Chapter 17
THE SECRET LIFE OF THE EMPTY PACKHORSE
Pops and I drove up the Mitchell farm road in the morning to spend the day examining and certifying Grubby’s animals for sale. Bubba Boyd had increased his offer to eighty-seven thousand dollars and all auction proceeds. Grubby signed the papers without consulting Mayna. Now it was a matter of inspecting the beasts, cataloging the equipment, and readying everything for public sale the next day at noon.
Grubby was with the Went & Went Auctions man in the cul-de-sac, tagging three generations of gear as it was brought out from the barns—a sprayer, manure spreader, bed tiller, three drag harrows, bale wrappers, hay rakes, front loader and backhoe attachments, an ancient mechanical scythe, a rusted reaper-binder with broken tines—all of it power washed and prepped and laid out like casualties of a lost battle.
We parked and exited the truck. Grubby had herded his animals into various pens at barn side and in the back. Sheep and goats in one, steer in another, the single stud bull tied to a tree.
Pops introduced himself to George Went but didn’t linger. “We’ve got a full day, so best get at it. Anything I need to know, Grubby?”
“Gotta bit a hard bag on one a the ewes. You’ll see.”
Pops nodded and we went to the sheep pen. I set up the squeeze chute to the stocks and a return chute to an empty holding pen. By lunch the sheep had been inspected, vaccinated, and turned out.
Pops and I ate on the open bed gate of his truck and watched silently as piece after piece of Grubby’s equipment inventory was brought out from the barns or up from the outfields. It seemed as if the entire history and evolution of farming apparatus in eastern Kentucky was located, cleaned, tagged, and ledgered—waiting expectantly for new employment. I told Pops I had to pee and he pointed to the house. I knocked on the side kitchen door and after no answer I pushed in.
Mayna Mitchell’s kitchen was old and childless. A small table of red-speckled Formica and shining chrome legs. A butcher block by the stove, scooped and pitted from generations of Mitchell carvings. Heavy oak cabinets on the walls, so thick it appeared as if the rest of the house had been built around them.
A crowded knickknack shelf hung by the stove holding Mayna Mitchell’s life in miniature. A black speckled cow with a tiny blue ribbon; a pewter church; a carved farmer and his wife bending over to kiss; a tiny lock-top box for her mother’s wedding ring; a ceramic Magic Kingdom from their trip to Florida; the silver medal from the Tri-County Spelling Championship in 1955; a miniature Bible with words too small to read; carved letter blocks spelling Bless This Kitchen; Ray Jr.’s combat ribbons; next to it a photo of him in his dress whites and an army-issue scowl; another of him on a mountain somewhere, dogtagged and shirtless.
I found the bathroom, peed, and returned to the yard. The auction van had left, and Pops and Grubby were standing alone in the driveway. Pops’ arms were crossed. Grubby’s hands were jammed into his back pockets.
“… gettin out from the bank’s the thing.”
“How behind are you?”
“Enough. It’s wearin on Mayna.”
“Where is she today?”
“Visitin Ray. This is the week when…”
“I know, Grub. Not an easy time.”
I could see Grubby begin to well up. “I think they mighta left the other sprayer in the barn.” He took off, head down.
“Let’s see to these steer and get out of here,” Pops said to me, hard edges of disappointment and disgust in his voice.
We set up the squeeze chute at the steer pen and began herding the animals into the stocks, including the recently castrated and dehorned yearling bulls, which were docile and compliant. By six o’clock we had finished and walked up to the Mitchell house.
Grubby was alone at the kitchen table. The screen door diffused the weak kitchen light into a gray halo that hung over him. We knocked, then eased into the room.
Grubby had taken Ray Jr.’s photo from the knickknack shelf. The table was empty except for the picture and a rounded plate of clay with a child’s handprint pushed into the middle. The clay had been kilned and shellacked to sienna, then painted Happy Father’s Day, Love Ray 6-17-59 at the bottom in blue.
Grubby held the hardened handprint like a holy tablet. Brushing the edges and brailling the indented fingers; feeling the young creases at each knuckle and outlining the innocent folds of his boy’s palm; tracing his lifeline as if drawing out memories of those first eight years, memories as raw and lush as if they had come in from morning.
“Um, Grubby, we’re heading out. I left all the paperwork on the workbench in the barn.”
Grubby was lost in the handprint and said nothing.
“Grub?”
We left him drowning in thoughts of his only son, the recollections flooding back in a levee break of sadness. He stood and walked slowly out of the kitchen, all the old rememberings stooping him like bagged sand.
When Bobby Clinch’s thumb began to throb, it was a sure barometer of coming weather. Usually, the boys at Hivey’s would spend a day tracking the regularity of the thumb twitches and vigorously debating their relationship to probable rain. But peculiarities of climate just seemed less important now. They ringed the cold woodstove, blowing down on fresh coffee, trying unsuccessfully to fill the morning with normal.
“She’s goin again,” Bobby offered and held his thumb to the light.
“Hmm,” Jesper said.
“Comin regular now,” Andy Teel assessed.
“Twice this hour,” someone else said.
“Nevmind, she done stop,” Bobby reported, lowering his hand.
The conversation hawed again.
They barely noticed Grubby Mitchell come in, freshly washed and shaved, with a press on his shirt. He paraded to the back by the stove, stood awkwardly with his new tool belt waisted, until the boys nodded. None of them were in the mood for Grubby Mitchell.
Grubby shifted foot to foot, waiting for a conversation thread with which to spool. Bump rearranged the Captain Earl’s Bug Buster display and moved it two aisles to the right. Andy Teel picked up a wayward kernel of feed corn and tossed it into the open door of the stove.
“Way Uplander says he thinks his hip replacement wasn’t greased right or something,” Grubby finally offered. “Says that Indian doctor cut corners on him.”
“Hmm,” Jesper said.
“Doctors,” Bobby replied.
“Yup.”
Grubby and Mayna Mitchell bought one of the old houses on Kaymore Street for thirty-five thousand dollars cash. She soon adjusted to town living, walking to Dempsey’s, walking to Hilda Jensen’s and the Deal sisters’, walking to her women’s club meetings. Sometimes she missed the old place, but town living had so many advantages. There wasn’t that constant track of dirt throughout the house, for one, or that incessant farm smell, which she had only really noticed once they had moved and the smell went. It was Raymond who was having difficulty.
Grubby Mitchell was a man who needed to be doing, and for forty-five years of his life, doing is exactly what he did. Now, with some money in the bank and time on his hands, he kicked around the county like an empty packhorse. Paid cash for a new Ford truck with a chrome step bar and double tires at the back and drove proudly up and down Main Street to break the engine in ahead of schedule; he accomplished that in two weeks and was idle again.
He raked all the leftover leaves in the deserted yards on Kaymore, then was idle again. He went out to Bobby Buford’s to talk farming, but Bobby had never taken Grubby’s advice before and certainly wasn’t going to now. He visited other farms around the county, but his suggestions were met with polite silence. Now that he was a town man, his farming experience, regardless of its length and quality, just wasn’t valued.
He soon settled into a plodding existence that made even the long summer days seem perpetual. He would lie in bed each dawn searching for any subtle change in the ceiling as everything about the morning glaciered to another interminable afternoon.