2: THE .308

Howard Elman driving, drinking a beer, thinking, forgetting what he thinks.

Toward Darby. Into the shroud of a late-November afternoon. The finger carried off by a wind, to return perhaps some night years hence as he lay floating, as old men do, in a shallow sleep of bright, tossed colors. Swett’s place empty as a yawn. Below, his own fields spotted with his belongings. Television antenna, up a tree, in danger of falling over.

Howard Elman and the De Soto were home.

“What are you doing here so early?” asked Elenore. She was a soft, small-boned woman, narrow and rounded in the shoulders and broadening at the hips, and listing slightly, like a pear. She had tired eyes and plump white cheeks that cried for a pinch of red, and even with her mouth shut, part of one of her long upper teeth protruded over her thin lower lip.

She eyed Howard suspiciously. She didn’t like events to steal up on her. Then she noticed his bandaged hand and came to him and lifted the hand into her own.

“Lost my little finger at the shop,” he said.

“Does it hurt?” she asked. She was relieved, he could see, as though she had imagined something far worse.

“It don’t hurt,” he said. “They stitched it, and numbed it up. Don’t even feel like I got a hand.”

He sat at the kitchen table and she brought him a beer, knowing without having to ask that he would want one. Given her feelings about alcohol, the act was remarkable, and he was grateful.

“I was working on wide-web looms,” he said to her, trying to clarify the accident in his mind. “I felt this snipping in my finger, and then nothing. Must have blacked out. Next thing I knew I was standing in the aisle, and Mr. Gordon says, ‘Get his finger out of his mouth,’ and William Potts says, ‘I ain’t getting near him,’ and Cooty Patterson is on his knees like he wants to sweep up, because he don’t know what else to do. So I took my finger out of my mouth, and I’ll be damned if there weren’t no finger there.”

Elenore began to become suspicious again. “When’s it going to be better?” she said.

“It ain’t going to be better—it’s gone,” Howard said. He knew what she was getting at. She was afraid he’d be out of work; she was thinking they were going to starve. Elenore thought the worst or she thought nothing at all. “It don’t matter, because the company’s paying,” he added, although really he wasn’t quite so sure. He was vaguely aware of workmen’s compensation, but he suspected that as a matter of course, the workmen were never actually compensated. He did not reveal the suspicion, because he knew that whatever his fears, Elenore’s would be greater.

She quieted for a moment. He guessed that she sensed he was concealing something from her. Helpless anger surged through him, and he twisted in his chair.

“So you’ll be here for a while,” she said.

“A while.”

“Freddy’s coming home tomorrow for Thanksgiving,” she said. “Why don’t you go get him.”

The suggestion drew off his anger, and he found himself pleased. But as usual he masked his pleasure.

“He ain’t crippled; he can burn a ride,” he said.

“Course he can,” Elenore said, and let the phrase hang there.

“Um,” he said. He wanted her to talk him into picking up the boy.

“If you go get him, you can bring home his laundry,” she said.

“I suppose.”

“I daresay the ride will do you good,” she said.

“I daresay . . .” he said, and they both knew the matter was settled. Tomorrow Howard would drive the one hundred miles to the university and fetch the Elmans’ only son. Howard imagined Freddy sitting on a pair of sheets puffed with laundry, his nose in a book. For the moment he was happy.

Howard sat at the kitchen table for about a minute. Then he went to the barn, staring blankly at a Dodge slant-six engine that had been hanging from a chain for four months. He retrieved a shovel and grub hoe that had been in the garden since spring and returned them to the shed. He marched briskly down the cellar, like a man with a mission, except that he had no mission. He opened the fuse box and shut it, whisked the dust off a few of Elenore’s preserves, checked the damp spot on the earthen floor with a push of his foot (it was still soft), all the while lugging his numbed hand, shaking it, squeezing it, trying to lend to it some substance. Eventually he returned to the kitchen. He didn’t know what to do with himself in this free hour before supper. Work-for-pay, work-for-pay, ticked his clock, but he wasn’t working, and no command came to eat, drink, fix, drive, screw, hunt, fish, sleep, paint, dig, behold.

“Where’s Heather?”

“Down the road.”

He helped himself to another beer. Elenore gave him a hard look, but she said nothing. She hated drink, feared it. Her father, mother, brothers, sisters—all were alcoholics. She tolerated Howard’s chronic but moderate beer drinking, but she could turn crazy when he was drunk. Once, after he had come home crocked, she had hit him over the head with a quart jar of tomato preserves. The resulting scene had sent their daughter Sherry Ann into a ten-minute screaming fit.

He watched Elenore knead a meat loaf. There were spots on the backs of her hands, and the joints were starting to knot from arthritis. Still, they were slender hands, stiff and glistening like a cluster of twigs after an ice storm.

She had changed since her latest operation, a year ago. She seemed older, weaker, and full of new thoughts. It seemed as though she were always sick, always having operations. He could not understand how she could be religious, devoted to a God who made her suffer so. In the early years of their marriage, she had worked a full-time job (as an aid in various nursing homes), cared for a house, and raised a family. But she hadn’t worked since the last operation, and he doubted whether she could ever work full-time again.

He remembered the first time he ever saw her, thirty-three years ago, when she was a girl of fifteen. The state had taken her from her alcoholic family and put her in Uncle Jack’s foster home. Howard was only a boy himself at the time, but on his own, doing the only thing he knew, working as a farmhand for board, room, and a few dollars a week. He remembered she had a boxed lip from the back of Uncle Jack’s hand, and scared eyes, hunted eyes, and something else, something magical. What was it? He could not remember.

“I daresay,” Howard said, pacing, holding his bandaged hand in the palm of his good hand. “I daresay . . .” He wanted to say something about their early love. “I daresay,” he began for the third time.

“Stop daresaying and start saying,” Elenore said, impatient.

“Uncle Jack was the closest thing I ever seen to a father,” Howard said, “but—no doubt—he was the meanest man ever to walk the face of the earth, meaner even than Swett.”

“He wasn’t so bad before Marlene got sick,” said Elenore.

“She was already in bed with sores when I got there,” Howard replied, still searching in a part of his mind for a way to say something about their early love. “I admired how she kept her hair all done up, even though she couldn’t even go to the toilet alone.”

“That wasn’t her hair. That was a wig.”

“Nooh?”

“After all these years you never figured that out?”

“I never doubted bacon come from a pig either,” said Howard.

“Oh, she was bald all right. Had a few hairs here and abouts, but most generally you’d say she was bald. Poor thing. I turned sixteen the day she passed away.”

Elenore’s right hand left the meat loaf, which had nearly taken on its final shape, and she made the sign of the cross, leaving a greasy spot on her forehead.

Howard continued to pace, thinking. He was seventeen when he went to work for Uncle Jack, or so he suspected. The truth was, he didn’t know how old he was. His age, along with other facts about his origins, had been lost as he was shuttled from foster home to foster home. Home, hell, he thought. The state would send him to a “home,” which was always a farm, and the farmer would be paid by the state to feed him and care for him, and the farmer would work him ten hours a day for no wages. Eventually he would get into trouble, and the state would send him on to the next “home.” All the while, it settled in his mind that he loved land and hated working land. So when it came his turn (thanks to World War Two money), he bought this little farm, fixed the house, put in oil heat and insulation, pruned the apple trees (once every ten years), laid out a garden, and made a solemn promise to himself and to a hundred boulders that sat like judges in his fields that crops, cows, chickens, and horses (the stupidest of creatures, in Howard’s view) would be raised on other farms by other fools. “Up yours, Uncle Jack,” he said silently, “and good riddance to horseshit.” Well, not quite. He had kept a pony for his daughter Charlene.

Charlene had been conceived in Uncle Jack’s hayloft, and Howard and Elenore had to get married. Not that they were burdened or shamed by the situation. In the circles they grew up in, pregnancy was regarded as part of the courtship.

He tried again to say something about their early love.

“I daresay . . .” He paused, began again, “I daresay,” paused again, and asked, “When’s supper going to be ready?”

“When it’s always ready,” Elenore answered.

“Where’s Heather?” he nagged.

Elenore glared at him. He finished his beer and immediately opened another. He checked the weather seals on the kitchen windows, and then peeked at the top of the refrigerator for no good reason.

“Why don’t you go to the dump?” Elenore finally said in exasperation.

It was just the right suggestion, and Howard was grateful for it. He patted her on the rump.

One-handed, he loaded four battered galvanized trash cans onto the pickup. As he was backing the truck out of the driveway, he saw the lights go out in the kitchen. Elenore would be walking slowly into her sewing room, which she had converted into a shrine for Mother Mary. She would be kneeling on the bare floor, praying, hunched over like some creature in a circus. He could see her in his mind’s eye kissing the tiny crucifix of her rosary. He didn’t mind her religiousness, but he hated the kneeling. If he ever decided to talk to God, he resolved to stand up to Him. He drove off, nursing his beer and occasionally shaking his numbed hand, trying to get some feeling into it.

Elenore belonged to no parish, confessed to no priest. She was a TV Catholic, her romance with the Church having begun in the 1950s as a flirtation with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and his televised sermons. Later she followed Sunday Mass on Channel 22. She had learned the rudiments of Catholicism from a set of catechisms she bought at a rummage sale. It was hybrid religion, but Elenore was devout and faithful to it.

Something at the dump burned with a low hiss, and Howard strained for a moment to listen to it. It was a pleasant sound, like Elenore’s praying. Years ago, when she first got her catechism, she would read to him as they lay in bed, he with his arm thrown over his eyes to shield them from the light, listening as if to crickets.

Who made us? God made us.

Why did God make us? God made us to know Him, to love Him and serve Him in this world and be with Him in the next.

Wonderful entertainment, Howard thought. Good questions and good answers, like parts in a machine.

The Elmans ate supper as usual at five-thirty.

In Freddy’s chair sat Music, Heather’s cat, like the girl plain but athletic, with little interest in keeping clean. Music pawed food out of his dish onto the chair, sniffing in a suspicious crouch, half closed his eyes, purred, and began to feed. Heather, too, purred, imitating the cat, but improvising, so that one heard in the purring the melody of a popular song. Heather scrambled potatoes and peas into a greenish mortar and constructed a fortress of the food, imprisoning her meat loaf within. She called her father’s attention to the creation; he grunted in approval. She then ate a doorway into the fortress and released the meat loaf, attempting to cut it into the shape of a star. This effort met with failure. She plucked a piece of meat with thumb and forefinger and ate it. Another piece went under the nose of the cat, which took the chunk between its two front paws, sniffed it, dropped it, and smacked it off the chair. Music then did a 360-degree turn in midair and resumed feeding. Girl and cat purred for the duration of the meal.

Half of Elenore’s plate was demurely sprinkled with meat loaf and peas. Two blocks of store-bought cake occupied the other half. Cakes, pies, puddings, ice cream, came often to her table and to her dreams. Indeed, sweets had shaped her body like a drop of honey. She ate with her back straight and her head up, a slightly uncomfortable, formal pose of reservation and gravity.

For Howard, eating was a sort of meditation exercise. He remained silent during the meal and unaware of those around him, the act of eating a ritual of fork, hand, and mouth; his head approaching the plate until it was just a few inches away; the bite; and then the procedure reversed—the tide comes in, the tide goes out. Later, in the living room, Heather sang to her homework; the cat dozed in electronic warmth on top of the television, which played to no one yet dominated the room; Elenore sprawled in her chair like a hastily dropped overcoat.

Howard shook his hand. The numbness had left, and was replaced by a vibrating sensation, as if something were laughing at the stub of his finger.

“Hurt?” asked Elenore, head thrown back, jaw slack.

“What?”

She pointed to her hand.

“Starting to hurt,” said Howard, “and it’s buzzing.” He banged the hand against his hip, preferring the pain to the buzzing.

“They give you any pills?” Elenore asked.

“I ain’t taking no pills.”

“When you hurt enough, you’ll take ’em.”

“Ain’t you smart,” Howard retorted with his best sarcasm.

Elenore snapped her mouth shut in resigned scorn. She knew more about pain than he did. You could begin with ideas about how to behave, how to live, how to die, and the ideas would take you through the first few stages—the fear, the rage at the unfairness, the disgust—but eventually there would be only the pain, a pure, white-hot sun in the belly, and all previous notions of order would be revealed as false gods of the prideful mind. In the end, you would surrender. They would turn you onto your belly and whisper to one another, and you would not care; they would jab you with a needle, and you would not care.

The pain vaguely frightened Howard. It was the odd, tingling sensation, as if a stranger with unknown powers and intent had got inside him. And, too, he saw his own foolishness at his small fear, knowing that most pain was self-inflicted. A deer could walk for hours with a bullet in its gut, could choke on its own blood, could lie breathing its last on a bed of decaying apples, and still suffer less than a man curled up safely in a trench, fearing guns, fearing not guns but the noise of guns, fearing not noise but that there would be a flash and no noise, fearing in the end a continuum of soundless flashes in which he would not know if he were dead and blown to hell or alive and insane (it was so; he had seen it), whereas the deer would die perfectly, without thought, without confusion, in the end without pain, slipping away with the softness of falling snow.

“I’m going up the hill and see Ollie, goddammit,” Howard announced, startling Elenore with his sudden good humor.

“Going to get drunk,” Elenore said.

“No I ain’t,” Howard said, spacing his words, self-satisfied at an idea that had just popped into his head.

“Going to get drunk,” repeated Elenore.

Howard smiled at her slyly. “Going to trade for a new deer rifle for Freddy,” he said. “Christmas is coming early this year.”

“You say it, and you believe it,” said Elenore, “but I know you’re going to get drunk.”

“Oh, I may have a couple,” he said, shaking his tingling hand. He marveled at her ability to magnify a tiny truth into a general principle.

The shack people were the invisible people of the town of Darby, indeed of all the towns in Cheshire County. The shack people lived in the town and yet were apart from it. They did not vote at town meeting; they did not join the Darby Volunteer Fire Department; they were not seen at quilting bees, sugar-on-snow parties, or square dances, although occasionally they showed up for the annual Fourth of July picnic on the town green. Their homes, which seemed calculatedly ugly—shacks, trailers, run-down houses—were scattered among beautiful trees, beautiful fields, beautiful stone walls. So much beauty surrounded them that it was easy for the other people of the town, the nice people, as they liked to think of themselves—the farmers, the commuters to Keene, the new people (all of whom seemed to have college degrees and big bank accounts)—to see only the beauty, as though no one could be truly poor in the midst of beauty. When the nice people thought about poverty, they thought about city ghettos full of black people. However, there was one family of shack people in Darby that was well known—the Jordans. Every town in the county had its family of “Jordans”—illiterate, uncouth, congenitally defective. It was as if the nice people singled out and focused upon a family so ridiculous and so beyond all help that the other shack people became that much less visible, and thus the nice people’s guilt about local poverty was blunted.

The Jordans lived in the shadow of a great sign, forty feet high and two hundred feet long, that sat on a windy crest and faced the interstate highway, three miles away on the Vermont side of the Connecticut River. BASKETVILLE—EXIT 8, said the sign. Behind it was a series of shacks and sheds, the outbuildings of an old chicken farm whose main house and barn had burned years ago. In the sheds resided dogs, cats, goats, pigs, rodents, cows, and chickens, ranked according to the rules of a rough feudalism in which a pig named Grunts was lord. In the shacks resided Jordans, similarly ranked, whose lord was Ollie Jordan.

Howard’s pickup rolled into the yard. Something crunched under a wheel. Dogs were out of the sheds yapping at his ankles the moment he stepped out of the cab. He cradled two six-packs of beer under his arm. Even in the cold air, with the hill wind crying through the frame of the great sign, he could detect the smells of the place: pigshit, garbage, piss, and something else, intense and sweet like a dead animal—the Jordans themselves. Willow Jordan yelled to him, from somewhere in the dark, “Come to fix the lights?”

Howard opened the door to the shack without knocking. A tiny girl with a snotty nose lunged at his leg. He picked her up, kissed her roughly on the cheek, and set her down. Her hair had captured the smells of the house. He followed the sound of the television into the next room—an adjoining shack, really. Here most of the Jordans were gathered. Helen Jordan, Ollie’s common-law wife, gave Howard a cold look, wiped her mouth, and looked away. She had long, saggy breasts that fell like tongues to her waist and flopped about in a loose-fitting cotton dress. Edith Jordan, who was Heather’s age but two years behind her in school, sucked on her thumb. Floyd and Fletch Jordan, twin boys age fourteen, wrestled in a doorway, which led to yet another shack, where their father, Dale Jordan, lay snoring-drunk on a bed. Back in the television shack, Noreen Jordan, only sixteen and unmarried, lay asleep on a couch, her child at her breast. On the floor sat Ollie’s deaf-and-dumb hunchback son, Turtle, pursing his lips and squinching his eyes. It was a moment before Howard realized that Turtle was mimicking his facial expressions.

Turtle and Willow—the latter was outside—were Ollie’s eldest sons. They were both mimics; they were both defective; they were both favored by Ollie. Neither had been to public school, although Willow had been sent by the state to Laconia for a year when he was young. They did not look like brothers. Willow was heavy and dark, Turtle slight and blond. Howard suspected they’d had different mothers.

At a card table sat Ollie Jordan, cleaning a shotgun. His body was hard and angular, like chicken feet. His face was dominated by a potatolike nose, coursed with purple veins and smashed red capillaries. Every thirty seconds or so, his hand jumped to the nose to scratch it.

“Ollie, you need a bigger place,” said Howard.

Ollie Jordan glanced at Howard’s bandaged hand, but said nothing. Under his rules of etiquette, it would be up to Howard to raise the subject of the lost finger.

“The bigger the house, the more people fill it,” Ollie replied, pronouncing one of his many laws.

They broke into the beer Howard had brought. Ollie gave a can to Turtle, telling him something in Jordan sign language.

“I heard Willow outside,” said Howard.

“He climbs up the sign and hollers his goddamn head off. God damn him, yes!” The nose brightened, as though signifying the torment caused by Willow.

“Can’t you shut him up?” asked Howard, knowing perfectly well there was no way short of murder to shut up Willow Jordan.

“Dog barks and you kick his ass twice and he still barks, it means he’s going to continue to bark.” Ollie lit his corncob pipe and scratched his nose.

“I ain’t had a dog since the little girl’s collie—or whatever kind of breed that goddamn animal was—was run over,” said Howard.

“You want a dog?”

“Don’t want a dog. Want a deer rifle for my boy.”

“Nobody wants a good dog anymore. All they want’s a house dog. You bring a good dog in the house and you kill his nose.”

“I never could understand that collie,” said Howard. “She’d wait by the road for hours to chase cars.”

“Every critter, animal or man, has got a stupid streak,” Ollie said.

“Ain’t that the truth. Goddamn.”

“Goddamn.”

“Goddamn.”

“That boy can shoot a rifle, all right,” said Ollie.

“Freddy’s the best natural shooter I ever saw,” Howard bragged.

“Natural law,” said Ollie.

To Ollie Jordan, laws were the presents nature bestowed upon the thoughtful man, as the town dump bestowed useful materials upon the wise scavenger, to be gathered and put together after one’s own fashion, private creations for private uses rather than principles standing alone. “Trout feed after a rain” was law if you caught trout after a rain; people saying “How are youuu?” and dogs sniffing one another’s hind ends were laws for some people and some dogs; and Ollie could understand and respect such laws and see how they meant the same thing and how they served the respective species without ever having a desire to adopt the laws as his own.

“Got a nice little three-oh-eight. Ain’t been fired maybe two or three times.”

Howard nodded, and Ollie left to get the weapon, which he kept in a box under lock and key.

Howard’s head felt light, but not from the beer. He was feverish. A crazy image appeared in his mind: a tray of spare parts for wide-web looms that included nuts, bolts, cogs, pins, and his own little finger.

Ollie returned with the rifle and gave it to Howard, and then he spoke in sign language to Turtle, his fingers twirling like those of an old woman knitting. Turtle went into the kitchen and came back with a single bullet.

“Used to have a scope on it,” said Howard, inspecting the weapon.

“Owned by a Massachusetts hunter.”

“You fire it?”

“No. But you can.” Ollie took the bullet from the hunchback, gave it to Howard, and put an empty beer can on top of the television set.

Jordans gathered around Howard, expecting entertainment. Edith, thumb still in her mouth, fled to the kitchen. Noreen remained asleep with her baby. Howard sighted the rifle at the can, wincing at the pressure of the gun on his bandaged hand.

“I’m going to hit the goddamn screen,” he said.

“Goddamn, it’s only across the room.”

Goddamn you, Ollie, Howard thought. Howard’s hand was as tender and pulpy as a rotted melon—as any fool could see. But Ollie Jordan, who was not a fool, could not see. Every man a fool in his own way. He could refuse to fire the weapon inside, but that would insult Ollie. And he would rather shoot the television or Ollie himself than insult him. He decided to fire the damn thing one-handed.

The resulting explosion temporarily deafened Howard and scrambled his perceptions. He felt as though he had been thrown back in time, into a den of cavemen. Turtle Jordan lay on his back, arms spread, a faraway look in his eyes, as though something very beautiful had happened. Noreen, child screaming soundlessly at her breast, sat bolt upright, a terrified look on her face, as though she believed she had awakened in hell. Floyd and Fletch writhed on the floor belly-laughing, reminding Howard of a silent movie. On the television screen, a man with a suit and tie chased another man with a suit and tie. Disgraceful—well-dressed men behaving like that, Howard thought.

The voice Howard heard next might have been Willow’s whispering through the bullet hole in the wall, a meaningless message that Howard’s brain, desperate for order, would invest with words. But in fact the voice was Ollie’s, emerging from the silence as he inspected the beer can critically.

“You hit it a little high, Howie,” he said, “but I don’t believe it shoots high. I believe you pulled it.”

Then Howard heard the child crying and the teenage boys laughing, and Noreen shouting, either at him or at Ollie, he couldn’t be certain, “You bastid, you bastid, you bastid.”

Howard agreed to give Ollie a chain saw for the rifle. The gun was worth more, but Ollie owed Howard the difference in compensation for repair work that Howard had performed on his vehicles over the years. Nor would Howard deliver the chain saw. It would stay in his barn, and he would continue to use it, bound by the unwritten, unspoken agreement to maintain it or have on hand its equivalent in case it wore out. This winter, next winter, the winter after, perhaps never, Ollie would come by with Turtle to fetch his saw. Their method of barter had evolved over the years, and neither would have been able to explain how it worked. Listening to them talk, a stranger could not guess that a bargain had been struck.

The finger that he did not have began to itch, and as he lay in his bed, soft pear of Elenore beside him asleep or perhaps faking sleep, he wished he had got drunk so that sleep would come like a door’s shutting. Come to fix the lights? If she had been faking sleep, she would by now be asleep, for she would know by his breathing that he was not drunk, and so her ancient fear would be laid to rest for another night. Come to fix the lights? He had missed a few minutes of his life today. They had floated off with the lint puffs in the shop. He tried to scratch the finger, and discovered that something that wasn’t there couldn’t be scratched, though it could itch. Teeth, straight teeth. It was going to be a collld winter. Ask Willow. Ask Willow nothing, for he was an animal. Observe and behold. You could observe the behavior of humans ad infinitum and never know how cold the winter would be, but the animals could tell you. He scratched the finger that was not there until pain overrode the itch, and a tiny trickle of blood wet the sheet. As the pain subsided, the itching returned. How was it that something that no longer existed could make you feel?