In the bountiful plenty, when the mines were fat with fuel and the soil gave back its best, they passed with shoulders set high and arms working like pistons pushed and pulled by the rods of their legs. Always forward. Relentlessly forward, hard hewn to task and actualized on effort. The talk, when had, was tricked trucks and new ATVs; rear-projection televisions and football prognostications; animal husbandry triumphs and county fair ribbons. In the bountiful plenty, usefulness was their province, their simple singularity.
But now, in the staggering lean, they lay by on make-work and unrequired errands; they passed to no place in particular with shoulders slumped and eyes averted, with a discourse that ran to foreclosures and fully played-out seams, meager harvests and disappearing trout streams. It was as if everything they had set store by—the fields, the mines, the consistent means—was all turned about, leaving truck repossessions and canceled Florida vacations; idle squeeze chutes and farm store credit; questioning wives and hard kitchen table talk.
Chapter 5
BULL TESTICLES
I was up Monday morning before Pops, just as the sky was beginning its run to purple and blue. I put on a full pot of coffee for him and sat at the kitchen table until he woke—coffeepot dripping and spitting as the first yellow light from the east fired the tops of the Medgar mountains. Then stirrings from upstairs and the creaking of floorboards under weight.
“Morning, Kevin,” he said as he entered the kitchen. “Are you early for work or late to bed?”
“Early. I wanted to get a head start on things.”
“That’s a fine habit. We won’t be leaving for about a half hour, but better to be ahead of schedule than behind, I say.”
“I made you coffee.”
“I see that. Thank you.” He poured two cups, sat at the table opposite me, and pushed the extra cup across the white painted wood. “Anyone gets up this early is deserving of a cup.”
“Thanks. Mom lets me sometimes when my dad is away.”
“How’s your dad doing? He and I didn’t get to talk much when he was here.”
I shrugged. Watched an air bubble sail across the brown sea of coffee. After a while I said, “He thinks it’s my fault, you know.”
“That’s ridiculous. What makes you say that?”
“Because he told me.”
Pops’ lips became a single line and he dropped his chin as he stared into me. “When did he tell you this?”
“About a month after it happened. He was driving me to band practice. We were in the car, not talking or playing the radio or anything; just riding, me and him silent. After Josh died it was like that—never talking.” I took a sip of coffee and pushed the cup around in a circle. “We come to this stoplight and he turns to me and says, ‘None of this would have happened if you’d just done as you were told.’ Then the light goes green and he turns back to the road and goes all silent again and we just keep driving as if we had been talking about a school project.”
Pops exhaled slowly and brought his right hand up to his eyes, rubbed the sleep from them, then ran his fingers down across his cheek to his chin in time with the last remnant of air expelling from his lungs.
“What happened was not your fault. You know that, right?”
I nodded. Could feel approaching tears.
“But being blamed for a tragedy like this by someone you count on is about as hard a thing as a man can handle.”
I blinked into my coffee until I could swallow again. “I just don’t know why he blames me. He never told me to—”
Pops cut me off. “Kevin, people deal with grief in different ways. Some folks turn inside themselves like your mom, and others need to blame like your dad is doing. He’ll come around—in the meantime, you stick with me.” He put his hand on my arm and squeezed. His grip was strong and warm. I looked up and he smiled.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said again, softly this time.
“I’m afraid she’s always gonna be like this.”
“Unlikely, but I suspect it’ll take her a while. What you both saw would rip the head from the shoulders of most people. I’m real proud of the way you’ve handled it. You’ve acted like a man and you’ve been a big help to me and Audy Rae—and to your mom.”
We were silent for what seemed like a quarter hour, Pops with his hand on my arm, eyes into me; me moving my coffee cup around the table, drawing circular patterns with the drippings.
“Let’s start thinking about breakfast.”
After dishes, I followed Pops out to the shed where he kept his veterinary supplies. The outside of the structure was weathered gray wood—thick of the grain brought out by the elements—topped with a corrugated tin ceiling and a weather vane stuck on west. Inside was immaculate and organized, with row upon row of polished wooden drawers, brass knobbed and wearing unrecognizable names: Amitraz, Bacitracin, Clindamycin, Dexamethasone, and on.
The ceiling was stocked with gleaming metal veterinary accessories—several sizes of forceps, polished spreader bars, clippers, clamps, shears, syringe guns—all dangling from overhead racks the way a chef hangs pots and pans.
“Castration is usually a simple cut-and-snip affair, but dehorning adult bulls is a bloody business. Usually we do it when they’re a few weeks old, but Grubby Mitchell waited too long, so we’ll give them a quick anesthetic. Let’s see…” He opened and closed several drawers. “Here we go.” He pulled out a small glass bottle that read Lidocaine HCL. “This will take the sting out.”
He loaded his satchel with several other veterinary accessories, latched it, and locked the shed. In the kitchen he poured us each another cup of coffee in travel mugs. Mine read:
Bacitracin
for Ulcerative Posthitis
Merck Animal Health
“What’s ulcerative posthitis?” I asked. I figured any additional knowledge would serve me well as Junior Veterinarian.
Pops laughed. “Something you don’t want to get.”
“What is it?”
“Pizzle rot.”
“Pizzle rot?”
“A nasty fungus that affects ram penises. A ram with pizzle rot is an unhappy ram, let me tell you. For that matter, a man with pizzle rot is pretty unhappy too.”
“We can catch pizzle rot?”
“We can, but not from sheep.” He winked and put his hand on the back of my neck to direct me toward the door. A fragment of a smile tried to find its way up from the last two months.
Pops’ truck was a twenty-year-old green Ford F-150 with thick tires at the back and a history of dents and dings from a generation of calls around the county. He put the satchel in the back and I slid onto the passenger-side bench seat. He reversed out to Chisold and took a right on Watford.
We headed through the west side of town to Route 17, passing storefronts abandoned like October cornstalks—Xs taped across windows, a crack in one. Edwina’s Discount Apparel. Diffley’s Taxidermy. Kathy’s Kustom Kurtains. A deserted gas station on the corner—naked islands stripped of pump hardware, weeds breeding in the pavement fissures. A still-open liquor store.
We came to the intersection of Routes 17 and 32. A four-story structure sat abandoned on a cut-in on the corner. Small windows frosted over, some boarded, some broken. Ten-foot chain-link with concertina wire on top.
“What’s this old building?”
“This used to be the plant for Lux Industries, a chemical company that employed just about everyone in town who wasn’t a miner. They made urinal mints, splash guards, and other things for public toilets.”
“What are urinal mints?”