Chapter 10
THE PARADOX OF PENNING CATS
We rode out to Route 27 and back toward town. “All five of the Budget brothers were laid off from the mines,” Pop explained. They’ve been getting by cutting wood, doing odd jobs, and taking charity. Sen wasn’t prepared to carry a lame mule on the family income. Besides, that mule will feed them for a month. I don’t spite him for killing the animal; I just objected to him endangering you and subjecting his family to it. Tilroy raised that mule from a colt. It was like a family pet.”
I thought about how the mule seemed to take death in a plodding, deliberate way; how the shot broke the window across the yard; how Pops confronted Budget with a rage I’d never seen in him; and how the dying man in the room looked at me, pleading for something to interrupt his own plodding, deliberate death. I shook my head, like the shot mule, to rid my mind of death thoughts. “Is mule meat any good?” I asked.
“Let’s hope we never have to find out.”
We followed the road around Medgar toward the opposing line of mountains on the eastern side of town. Abandoned mine shafts spotted the hill grades, and the rusted remains of the underground economy were laid out in front like the rejected toys from a family of giants—a four-foot-high electric locomotive attached to a line of low-slung hopper cars, its tracks worming down into a mine shaft; ventilating fans the size of jet engines next to two thick iron hoops of a rotary dumper; a dead Joy loader with one arm missing; idled conveyors running to rusted corrugated structures, then snaking up to the hillside shafts like felled dominoes.
After a while Pops broke the silence. “Next stop, Fink’s Hollow.”
“Fink’s Hollow? I know a kid named Buzzy Fink. Think he lives up there?”
“I know he does. Buzzy’s grandfather is who we’re seeing. We’ve got to vaccinate some animals against rabies. A rabid fox attacked a cat and the cat tried to bring down a horse at full trot. The cat’s dead, but the horse and the rest of the barn animals need shots. How do you know Buzzy Fink?” He glanced from the road.
“I met him in the woods couple weeks ago. I got bit by a spider and he made me a poultice.”
“Really?” Pops said, looking at me with bemused eyebrows.
We rumbled along Route 27, then turned right, then left on Route 32. Soon after, Pops took a sudden left onto an unmarked dirt road that disappeared into the thick woods.
We followed the slow grade up the hollow, occasionally crossing the bolting creek that split the middle. Unlike in Beaver Hollow, the woods and gullies were clean of hillbilly garbage. I asked Pops about it.
“The Finks are poor, but they’re proud poor. Esmer runs the hollow hard. Kids stay in school; they truck their garbage out once a week. These are solid people.”
We pulled into a semicircle of twelve trim, self-built houses, some with siding, some with plywood, set around a large old log cabin as points are placed around a compass. Behind the log cabin was a rank of barns, pens, and miscellaneous farm equipment. An idle pig nursed an old corn husk, claiming acceptable shade under an old piece of plywood stacked against the side of the house. In the corner of the low-ceilinged porch, smoking a cob pipe and rocking in his homemade rocker, was Esmer Fink, patriarch of the hollow, pushing onto his toes and back down gently onto his heels.
Pops and I got out of the truck. He pulled his leather case from behind the cab. “Afternoon, Esmer,” he said as we climbed the worn wooden steps, fitting our feet into the scooped runners.
“Taint afternoon yet,” Esmer said.
“Morning, then.”
“Mornin back,” Esmer responded, rocking onto his toes and back down gently onto his heels. His face was pleated and pinched from eighty-three years in Fink’s Hollow. According to Pops, he was born in one of the ruined cabins on the hill, lived for most of his life in one of the hollow’s plywood houses, then moved to the main cabin—“Giggins Hoo,” the Finks called it—fifteen years ago after his uncle Thurlow died of lung and he became patriarch of the family.
Esmer Fink was a man of simple desires. His only vanity was his teeth, which he had proudly kept until age seventy-six (a record in Fink’s Hollow). Since then he had been losing them at a precipitous rate, and with every lost cuspid, the entire hollow walked on eggshells.
“Giiaaddaaamnmmisserabblesonsabitches,” it would start from the bowels of Giggins Hoo. Esmer would storm for a week in a black funk, kicking chickens and treating the goats unnecessarily rough, until he settled back to his old self.
By now, Esmer was down to a few molars and a single incisor, which gave his cheeks extraordinary height and his chin unusual prominence.
“Esmer, this is my grandson, Kevin, says he knows Buzzy.”
Esmer raised his eyes slightly to look me over and exhaled wispy pipe smoke. “I suppose he does.”
“Is Buzzy here today?” I asked.
“He’s here.” Rocking onto his toes and back down gently onto his heels.
“Well, I guess we’ll get started,” Pops said.
“Cleo an the boys herded the propriate beasts into pens at the back. Let em loose when you’re done. Couldn’t round the cats, though. Cats is hard to pen.”
“That was thoughtful, Esmer. We’ll do our best with the cats.”
Esmer nodded.
“How is Cleo doing?” Pops asked. “Gonna be hard to have another year like last year.”
“He’s workin it ever day. Makes me tired jus watchin. Coach from Ohio State come up last week. Dint impress me.” Esmer sniffed. “Cle’s got his heart set on Notre Dame, anyway.”
“Notre Dame’s a fine choice. I’d like to talk more about it after we inoculate your herd.”
We walked down the steps and around the side of the house. The two pens held five ragged dogs of suspicious pedigree, one about to give birth. Four were sleeping, and the nervous yelp of the pregnant one brought them to their feet, barking excitedly. The other pen held miscellaneous farm animals of varying social order. Four goats, seven sheep, an old swayback horse, and assorted lower barn life. The sheep tufted like lint, eyeing the goats and us with equal mistrust. Other than the cats, the only animal not penned was the pig in the shade out front. Penning him would have seemed redundant.
“Kevin, I’ll handle the dogs, you see if you can round up the cats, then we’ll do the others together.”
I was off to the front of the house, where a large mottled tabby lazed on the porch. I brought him to Pops, and after a quick shot he was back in the only sunny spot on the porch, annoyed at the intrusion. I spied two more on the hood of an early sixties Rambler station wagon that some years ago had suffered an arc welder conversion to pickup. They came peacefully and I replaced them on the hood in the sun. “How many cats do they have, Pops?” I asked as he was finishing the last of the dogs.
“Eighteen,” he said, loading a new syringe. I stood for a moment, unsure if he was joking. “You’re fifteen short.” He wasn’t joking.
The barn. Had to be cats in the barn. I walked toward the gray and red barn, which sat on the slight hill behind the houses. I crept into the darkened door but didn’t see any cats. Suddenly, from the top of the haystack in the corner, a six-foot blue-yellow flame, like the blast from a hot-air balloon, lit up the barn. I could see someone’s profile in the flame. It switched off abruptly, leaving the echo burning in my retina. “What was that?” I said to anybody, still blinded. I heard the haystack person jump to the ground and walk toward me, silhouetted against streaming sunlight through the barn slats. A lighter flicked and the flame returned, swallowing air in a whoosh, licking inches from my face. I fell back into a hay bale, then scrambled up to run. Buzzy Fink walked into the sunlight, laughing. A can of hair spray in one hand, a lighter in the other.
“Hope you brought more hair spray,” he said. “This can’s bout beat.”
“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded, still frazzled from my close encounter with the hair spray flame.
“Fryin spiders. What the hell you doin?”
“My grandfather’s here to give your animals rabies shots and I’m trying to find all your cats.”
“The cats are gonna have to wait: I got two more spiders left and they’re gettin nervous. Come on.”