Kentucky Straight: Stories

  CHRIS OFFUTT

  KENTUCKY STRAIGHT

  Chris Offutt is the author of Out of the Woods, The Same River Twice, and The Good Brother. All have been translated into several languages. His work is widely anthologized and has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award. He lives in Iowa City with his wife and sons.

  A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL, NOVEMBER 1992

  FIRST EDITION

  Copyright © 1992 by Chris Offutt

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by

  Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

  and distributed simultaneously in Canada by Random House

  of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Some of these stories appeared in slightly different form in

  Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, Willow Springs,

  Northwest Review, High Plains Literary Review, Quarterly

  West, and Coe Review.

  The verse from “Another Place,” from The Late Hour, is

  reprinted from Selected Poems by Mark Strand, by

  permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Offutt, Chris.

  Kentucky straight / Chris Offutt. — 1st ed.

  p. cm. — (Vintage contemporaries)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79181-8

  1. Kentucky—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3565.F387K4 1992

  813’.54—dc2o 91-58062

  MAP COPYRIGHT © 1992 BY JAYE ZIMET

  Author photo © Sandy Dyas

  v3.1

  For Rita

  The author wishes to thank Jane O. Burns,

  the Copernicus Society of America

  for its James A. Michener Grant,

  and the Kentucky Arts Council.

  this is the mirror

  in which pain is asleep

  this is the country

  nobody visits

  —Mark Strand

  “Another Place”

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  SAWDUST

  HOUSE RAISING

  THE LEAVING ONE

  HORSEWEED

  OLD OF THE MOON

  SMOKEHOUSE

  BLUE LICK

  AUNT GRANNY LITH

  NINE-BALL

  SAWDUST

  Not a one on this hillside finished high school. Around here a man is judged by how he acts, not how smart he’s supposed to be. I don’t hunt, fish, or work. Neighbors say I think too much. They say I’m like my father and Mom worries that maybe they’re right.

  When I was a kid we had a coonhound that got into a skunk, then had the gall to sneak under the porch. He whimpered in the dark and wouldn’t come out. Dad shot him. It didn’t stink less but Dad felt better. He told Mom that any dog who didn’t know coon from skunk ought to be killed.

  “He’s still back under the porch,” Mom said.

  “I know it,” Dad said. “I loved Tater, too. I don’t reckon I could stand to bury him.”

  He looked at my brother and me.

  “Don’t you even think of putting them boys under that porch,” Mom yelled. “It’s your dog. You get it.”

  She held her nose and walked around the house. Dad looked at us again. “You boys smell anything?”

  My eyes were watered up but I shook my head no.

  “Dead things stink,” said Warren.

  “So does a wife sometimes,” Dad said, handing me his rifle. “Here, Junior. Put this up and fetch my rod and reel.”

  I ran into the house for his fishing pole. When I got outside, Dad was on his knees shining a flashlight under the porch. Back in the corner lay old Tater, dead as a mallet. “Blind casting,” Dad said. “This might turn out fun.”

  He spread his legs and whipped the rod and the line went humming under the porch. He reeled in a piece of rag. Dad threw again and hooked Tater but only pulled out a hunk of fur. On the next cast, his line got hung. He jerked hard on the fishing pole. The line snapped, the rod lashed over his shoulder and hit Warren in the face. Mom came running around the house at Warren’s screams.

  “What’d you do now?” she said.

  “Line broke,” Dad said. “Eight-pound test. Lost a good split sinker, too.”

  “Why don’t you cut a hole in the floor and fish him out like an ice pond!”

  “Don’t know where my saw’s at.”

  “That’s the worst of it! You’d have gone and done it.”

  She towed Warren up the gray board steps into the house. Dad broke the fishing pole across his knee. “Never should have had no kids,” he said, and threw the ruined rod over the hill. A jaybird squalled into the sky. Dad grabbed my shoulders and leaned his face to mine.

  “I wanted to be a horse doctor,” he said, “but you know what?”

  I shook my head. His fingers dug me deep.

  “I quit sixth grade on account of not having nothing to wear. All my kin did. Every last one of us.”

  He turned loose of me and I watched his bowed back fade into the trees. Wide leaves of poplar rustled behind him.

  A few years later Dad gave his gun away and joined the church. He got Warren a pup that fell off the porch and broke its leg. Dad cried all day. I was scared, but Mom said his crying was a sign that both his oars were back in the water. She told me to be proud. That Sunday, Dad climbed on top of a church pew in the middle of service. I thought he’d felt the Lord’s touch and would start talking in tongues. The preacher stopped his sermon. Dad looked around the room and swore to high heaven he would heal our pup’s busted leg or die trying. Mom made him sit down and hush. I got scared again.

  After church Dad carried the pup out the ridge to a hickory where he tried all day to fix its leg. He was still yelling at God when Mom sent us to bed. She found Dad in the morning. He’d taken off his belt and hanged himself. On the ground below him lay the pup, all its legs broken. It was still alive.

  Warren and I both quit school. He got a job and saved his money. I took to the woods hunting mushrooms, ginseng, and mayapple root. I’ve been places a rabbit wouldn’t go.

  Last fall Warren pushed a trailer up a hollow and moved into it. He said the one thing I was good for was taking care of Mom. Twice a week I walked to the Clay Creek Post Office at the foot of the hill. It and the church was all we had and they sat side by side between the creek and the road. Most people went to both but Mom and I divided it up. I got more mail than her and she took enough gospel for the whole county. I subscribed to a peck of magazines and read everything twice, even letters and household hints. They stopped coming because I never paid.

  Some days I went to the post office early to look at crooks the government wants. Sixty photographs were stapled together like a feed store calendar, and the faces were just regular folks. Under each one was a list of what the person did, where his scars were, and if he was black or white. It seemed odd to show a picture of a man and say what color he was. Around here, we’re mostly brown. I wouldn’t mind talking to somebody of another color but they don’t ever come around these parts. Nobody does. This is a place people move away from.

  One afternoon I saw a sign in the post office about a GED. Anyone could take the high school test from a VISTA center in town, and that set me to thinking on what Dad said about quitting school. He never read anything but the King James Bible and about a hundred maps. Dad collected maps the way some men kept dogs—big maps an
d little maps, favorites and no-counts. I’ve seen him study maps over a tree stump till way past dark. He wanted to know where the Land of Nod was at and who all lived there. The preacher told him it was lost in the Flood. Dad didn’t think so.

  “Everywhere has to be somewhere,” he always said.

  The GED fretted me for two days’ worth of walking in the woods. I almost stepped on a blue racer sunning on a rock. We watched each other for a spell, him shooting a little forked tongue out and me not able to think of nothing but taking that test. Most people run from a snake without ever knowing if it was poison or just alive. The GED was the same way. Failing couldn’t hurt me, and getting it would make everybody on the hill know I wasn’t what they thought. Maybe then they’d think about Dad differently, too.

  The next morning I hitchhiked to Rocksalt and stood on the sidewalk. People stared from cars. My hand was on the test place doorknob and sweat poured off me. I opened the door. The air was cool and the walls were white. Behind a metal desk sat a lady painting her fingernails pink. She looked at me, then at her nails.

  “The barbershop is next door,” she said.

  “I don’t want a haircut, ma’am. I might could use one but that ain’t what I come to town for.”

  “It ain’t,” she said like she was mocking me. She talked fast and didn’t always say her words right. I wondered what brought her to the hills. Things must be getting pretty bad if city people were coming here for work.

  “I’ll take that GED,” I said.

  “Who sent you?”

  “Nobody.”

  She stared at me a long time. Her hand moved like she was waving away flies and when the nail polish was dry, she opened a drawer and gave me a study book. It was magazine size with a black plastic binder.

  “Come back when you’re ready,” she said. “I’m here to help you people.”

  I was five hours getting home and the heat didn’t bother me a bit. By the time I got to the house, somebody had seen me in town and told a neighbor, who told Mom at the prayer meeting. That’s the way it is around here. A man can sneeze and it’ll beat him back to the porch.

  “They say you’re fixing to get learned up on us,” she said. “You might read the Bible while you’re at it.”

  “I done did. Twice.”

  “I ain’t raised no heathen then.”

  After supper I hit those practice tests. My best was reading and worst was math. A man can take a mess of figures and make it equal out to something different. Maybe some people like math for that, but a pile of stove wood doesn’t equal a tree. It made me wonder where the sawdust went to in a math problem. After all that ciphering, there wasn’t anything to show for the work, nothing to clean up, nothing to look at. A string of numbers was like an owl pellet lying in a game path. You knew a bird had flew over, but not the direction.

  Warren pulled his four-wheel-drive pickup into the yard, honking the horn. He used to work in town until they built a car plant in Lexington. Now he drives three hours a day to work and back. He’s got a video dish, a microwave, and a VCR.

  His boots hit the porch and the front door slammed. He walked in our old room. “What do you know, Junior? All on your ownself and afraid to tell it.”

  I shook my head. After Dad died, Warren went all out to make people like him. I went the other way.

  “Hear you’re eat up with the smart bug,” he said. “And taking that school test in town.”

  “Thinking on it.”

  “You ought to let up on that and try working. Then you can wear alligator-hide boots like these.”

  He pulled a pants leg up.

  “Where’d you get them from?” I said.

  “Down to Lex. They got a mall big as two pastures laid end to end. I bought these boots right out of the window. Paid the man cash, too.”

  “He saw you coming, Warren. They ain’t made no alligator nothing in nigh ten years. Government’s got them took care of.”

  “What makes you know so much?”

  “Read it in a magazine.”

  Warren frowned. He doesn’t put much store in anything but TV. Commercials are real people to him. I knew he was getting mad by a neck vein that popped up big as a night crawler.

  “I ought to kick your butt with these boots,” he said.

  “That won’t make them gator.”

  “It won’t take the new out either.” He scuffed my workshoes that were ordered from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. “You’re still wearing them goddam Wishbook clod-hoppers.”

  “Warren!” Mom screeched from the kitchen.

  She doesn’t mind cussing too awful much but taking the Lord’s name in vain is one thing she won’t stand for. Dad used to do it just to spite her.

  “You know what GED stands for?” Warren said. “Get Even Dumber.”

  He stomped outside, started his truck, and rammed it through the gears. Road dust rose thick as smoke behind him. I watched the moon haul itself above Redbird Ridge. Night crawled up the hollow. I went outside and sat on Dad’s old map-stump. A long time ago I was scared of the dark until Dad told me it was the same as day, only the air was a different color.

  In a week I’d taken every practice test twice and was ready for the real one. Everybody on the hill knew what I was doing. The preacher guaranteed Mom a sweet place in heaven for all her burdens on earth. He said I was too hardheaded for my own good.

  I got to thinking about that in the woods and decided maybe it wasn’t a bad thing to be. I’m not one to pick wildflowers and bring them inside where they’ll die quicker. And I’ll not cut down a summer shade tree to burn for winter firewood. Taking the GED was the first time I’d ever been stubborn over the doing of something, instead of the not doing. Right there’s where Dad and me were different. He was hardheaded over things he never had a say in.

  In the morning I left the hill and walked halfway to town before getting a ride that dropped me off at the test place. The lady was surprised to see me. She wrote my name on a form, and asked for fifteen dollars to take the test. I didn’t say anything.

  “Do you have the fee?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you have a job?”

  “No.”

  “Do you live with family?”

  “Mom.”

  “Does she have a job?”

  “No.”

  “Do you receive welfare assistance?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then how do you and your mother get along?”

  “We don’t talk much.”

  She tightened her mouth and shook her head. Her voice came slow and loud, like I was deaf.

  “What do you and your mother do for money?”

  “Never had much need for it.”

  “What about food?”

  “We grow it.”

  The lady set her pencil down and leaned away from the desk. On the wall behind her hung a picture of the governor wearing a tie. I looked through the window at the hardware store across the street. Dad died owing it half on a new chain saw. We got a bill after the funeral and Mom sold a quilt her great-aunt made, to pay the debt.

  I was thinking hard and not getting far. There wasn’t anything I had to sell. Warren would give me the money but I could never ask him for it. I turned to leave.

  “Junior,” said the lady. “You can take the test anyway.”

  “I don’t need the help.”

  “It’s free when you’re living in poverty.”

  “I’ll owe you,” I said. “Pay you before the first snow.”

  She led me through a door to a small room with no windows. I squeezed into a school desk and she gave me four yellow pencils and the test. When I finished, she said to come back in a month and see if I passed. She told me in a soft voice that I could take the test as many times as necessary. I nodded and headed out of town toward home. I couldn’t think or feel. I was doing good to walk.

  Every night Mom claimed a worry that I was getting above my raisings. Warren wouldn’t talk t
o me at all. I wandered the hills, thinking of what I knew about the woods. I can name a bird by its nest and a tree by the bark. A cucumber smell means a copperhead’s close. The sweetest blackberries are low to the ground and locust makes the best fence post. It struck me funny that I had to take a test to learn I was living in poverty. I’d say the knowing of it is what drove Dad off his feed for good. When he died, Mom burned his maps but I saved the one of Kentucky. Where we live wasn’t on it.

  I stayed in the woods three weeks straight. When I finally went to the post office, the mail hadn’t run yet. It was the first of the month and a lot of people were waiting on government checks. The oldest sat inside, out of the sun, and the rest of us stood in willow shade by the creek. A Monroe boy jabbed his brother and pointed at me.

  “If it ain’t the doctor,” he said, “taking a break off his books.”

  “Hey, Doctor, you aiming to get smart and rich?”

  “Yeah,” said his brother. “He’s going to start a whorehouse and run it by hand.”

  Everybody laughed, even a couple of old women with hair buns like split pine cones. I decided to skip the mail and go home. Then the one boy made me mad.

  “I got a sick pup at the house, Doctor. You as good on them as your daddy was?”

  Way it is around here, I had to do more than just fight. Sometimes a man will lay back a year before shooting somebody’s dog to get back at its owner, but with everyone watching, I couldn’t just leave. I walked to their pickup and kicked out a headlight. The youngest Monroe came running but I tripped him and he rolled in the dirt. The other one jumped on my back, tearing at my ear with his teeth. His legs had a hold I couldn’t break. He kept hitting the side of my face. I fell backwards on the truck hood and he let go of me then. Two old men held back the other boy. I crossed the creek and climbed the steep hill home, spitting blood all the way.