Chapter 15.
"Quick. Run through the trees over there," said Jacob to Tara, pointing at the windbreak of pine trees that lined the north and west sides of the farm. "I'll pick you up with the tractor on the other side. It's our best shot at getting you out of here."
"What?" said Tara. "That's your plan, to drive a tractor into town?"
"You can sit on the fender."
"That's a terrible plan."
"It's that or stay in the truck 'til kingdom come."
"I'm not staying here." She scrambled to get out of the truck and started to run in the rain, toward the trees. On the tractor, Jacob opened the throttle and the smokestack piped black. Down the driveway he rolled, peeking at the house for signs of his mother. When he neared the end of the driveway, he saw a blonde head behind a pine tree, slipping from one tree to the next. Jacob turned onto the gravel road and slowed down. He waved at Tara, but she did not come running. Instead, she pointed at the gravel road, jabbing her finger at something.
A combine approached, its red cab cresting over the hill and then crawling down the slope. Ray had returned home from the fields. Jacob continued driving, thinking he could simply pass his father on the road with a wave and gather Tara afterward. All would be well. But Ray veered the combine into the path of the tractor so that Jacob could not pass. Both vehicles stopped in the middle of the road, nose to nose. Jacob put up his hands and pointed at an imaginary watch, intending to tell his father that he needed to hurry.
Ray did not move in the cab of the combine and finally Jacob stepped down from the tractor and climbed the ladder of the combine.
Jacob opened the door and said, "All done picking? I was just coming out to the field."
"For what?" said Ray.
"To go get the wagons."
"Don't need to go get 'em now. They'll be dry under the tarps."
Jacob said, "I'll bring them home. No sense leaving them over there."
"What would you know about sense?" said Ray. "You sure as shit ain't got any."
"Gee Dad," he said, "thanks."
"Out boozing all night when you got playoffs yet to play."
"Boozing? I wasn't…"
"I'd knock you off the ladder for lying if I wasn't so nice. But I got some work for you. Wipe off that 'what' look, or I'll turn you in right now to the athletic director and you won't play next week."
Jacob put his head down. "I wasn't drinkin'."
"Lie to me again, I'll drop you from the will. Because guess what? This afternoon I'm meeting with the lawyer on just that subject."
"Lawyer?" said Jacob. "Ah Dad, we were just out after the game having fun."
"Carousing."
"Yeah, I guess," said Jacob, not sure what the word meant. "Didn't you ever go out...carousing?"
"Never," said Ray, raising his index finger toward Jacob's tractor. "Not once. Now turn that tractor around and I'll show you to the wood pile."
"The wood pile?"
"Move."
Cursing amid the tractor noise, Jacob climbed back onto the wet seat and shifted into reverse. He made a three-point turn in the road, shaking his head at Tara in the trees, whose hair flattened under the large drops of rain from branches overhead. When Jacob turned into the yard he saw her running and he drove toward her and stopped the tractor abruptly. He ran to her, behind a tree and shouted. "There's a phone in the milkhouse, Tara. Call someone, I can't help you." He departed, leaving her more confused than before. She could not protest or ask a question. He was gone, rushing back to the tractor and continuing onward and into the shed.
The combine came to a halt near the grain bins and Ray descended the ladder, hobbling across the gravel with a cane and a scowl. Jacob leaned against the tractor tire, biding his time, offering no assistance to his limping father. When Ray reached the shed, he said, "Go get the axe."
A wall of tools hung aligned with perfection from Ray's military sense of alignment. Judd, Jacob, Renee, and all who touched the tools carefully returned tools to their pegs, since a misplaced crescent wrench could trigger paint-curling wrath and a day of silent meals. The axe head sat on two nails and Jacob lifted it off, setting it in his hands. A light and easy swing, he thought, that's all it would take. He approached Ray holding the axe in his hands and before he could set it down, Ray yanked it from Jacob's hands and strapped it with his cane to the rack on the rear of the ATV. Ray wiped his hand across the seat of the 4-wheeler to clear off water that had dripped through a hole in the tin roof. The 4-wheeler engine squealed alive and Jacob wondered why he hadn't thought of it before. Tara could have taken the 4-wheeler to town. Or Ethan's car. Or Judd's. So many options, all slipping away. No mercy behind the sneer of Ray. "Get on," he said.
Ray drove the 4-wheeler to the pasture, to a thicket of trees on the edge of the property line where the family hewed its firewood. Jacob observed that Ray did not bother to get the chainsaw or the gas-powered hydraulic splitter that usually did the labor. The only tool this time, an axe.
Holding onto his father's sides felt terribly awkward. A juvenile feeling, riding with his Dad. The bumps of the pasture jostled enough that Jacob had to link his hands around his father's waist, fastening himself to the solid torso. Mud flying up from the rear tires peppered Jacob's back and head as the knobby wheels threw up wet earth and manure.
The thicket neared. Ray slowed the ATV to a reasonable speed, enough that Jacob could separate his hands. The number of trees in the bunch became fewer each year, as each spring Ray felled one or two trees and in the autumn axed one or two into firewood with the boys. "All of those stumps," said Ray, braking and stopping the 4-wheeler.
"What about the stumps?" said Jacob.
"I want them turned into kindling."
"What? Dad," Jacob said, incredulously. "We couldn't even split those with the machine last year."
"Get off the 4-wheeler and get chopping," said Ray. "Piss and moan about it to the squirrels when I'm gone."
"Can I at least get some gloves?"
"I'll come get you before dark."
"Dark? Ever heard of pneumonia?"
"Don't dawdle. You'll be out here tonight, too, if those don't get 'em chopped by the time I'm back."
The 4-wheeler turned and Jacob raised his middle finger at Ray's back and kicked a branch that lay by his foot.
Rain began to fall harder and Ray smiled at feeling the drops strike the bill of his hat. If only he had thought of this punishment years ago. The only penalty that Jacob seemed to understand and heed was the loss of time and the company of people. At the top of the hill in the pasture, he glanced back and witnessed the boy raise the axe overhead and take a swing. "Sticky isn't it?" said Ray, chuckling as he watched Jacob struggle to remove the axe-head from the stump. One day the boy would take a swing at him. Perhaps today. The desire to take a roundhouse gestated In a son's eyes, in the squints of the sidelong glances and the curl of the lip. It was coming. The boy needed to be humbled to be kept on track. Otherwise he would never be prepared for the hardness of the world. No verbal reprimand or lost privilege could explain to the brashness of Jacob's youth what cruel days awaited the careless and workless man. The world had taken the joy out of Ray and he was better for it. So would Jacob benefit. The boy had lived in too fat a time, not knowing what a drought was like, or what a year of blight on the crop meant. Jacob did not know about years when cattle had to graze the ditches, or when wind blew down the plants in August. He had not gone to school with one pair of pants for three years, patched like a quilt. He didn't know about weeks without electricity and what it was like to share the water from the tank that the cattle drank from. The boy had not experienced a winter when the pipes burst or a summer when the barn burned up from the hot hay. Everything too easy. The era itself. The cows always full, bins teeming with corn, supper table covered in food, dessert with every meal. Prosperity. It was prosperity in the G
arden that first invited the snake. The world no longer hard enough. And for Ray, this softening caused all children to suffer for not suffering. If manna fell from heaven each morning, Jacob would have been disappointed that it only came in one flavor.
The wood neither bent nor broke under the fall of the axe. After some twenty swings, Jacob began to let his eyes wander the pasture for some greater tool, something from the earth, some naturally occurring saw to use on the stumps. He swung the axe again, watching the blade sink a centimeter into the top and stop cold. Several more swings brought the same non-result. He tried to strike the same spot, but his entry point did not budge. If he had a wedge and a sledge, he could set the wedge and pound it, split the stump, but the puny axe bore no weight in its stroke. Thirty swings more, wild swings, and he felt the skin on the inside of his thumb start to soften. Already a blister, reddening and filling with fluid. No gloves. The chafe of a solid wood handle. He marveled at how a blister always formed in the same spot on his hand. The bottom part of his blue jeans had frayed. He ripped the hem off. It was enough cloth to wrap around the thumb, enough that he could keep swinging.
The axe head lifted and fell as he wondered about Tara. The cloth around his thumb slipped and he felt the blister pop, but he kept going, more irritated with each useless swing. Rawness in the thumb. Wouldn't it be nice if Tara came out here. How wonderful to have her outside. What a nice thing to try. Maybe not in the rain. The cows congregated.
"What do you want, cow?"
The herd of cows ambled to the thicket to inspect their visitor. At least he could talk to them – he had always enjoyed this vacuous audience. Jacob leaped upon a stump and shouted, "Gather, fat things!" A herd of eyes focused on him. "Be still, you corpulent ones. I learned that word for my last vocabulary test. You are both bovine and corpulent. Go forth and seek some chopped wood, that I might replace these stumps with…"
That was it. He stopped speaking and jumped down to the ground. Chopped wood on the farm - he could haul it to the thicket. The stack of wood near the house would do nicely. But if Jacob walked up the pasture to get it, Ray would surely crap a green worm. Plus, it would take forever to haul back and forth.
Jacob looked across the fence, behind the thicket, at the Bill Frye farm. Bad blood over there. Ray and Bill Frye – long since gone sour. They had had enough run-ins that they did not even wave at each other, drove past like ships in the night. Even Joke hardly waved any more after the gun-brandishing day – that day long ago when Ray shot a deer in the Marak pasture and it bounded across the fence, wounded, and came to rest behind one of Frye's machine sheds. Rather than chase the deer, Ray and Jacob drove the truck over to talk to Bill about retrieving the animal. When they arrived, Bill Frye had already claimed the buck as his own, standing guard over it while holding a .22 rifle, letting it dangle by his hip pocket. Jacob remembered his father saying, "Wouldya look at this, Jake. Bill must think he can scare a man with a pea-shooter. Get in the truck bed and lay low. Chamber a round. If he shoots me, I'll come back for the shotgun."
"What if he shoots you in the head?"
"Then you shoot him. Jesus, if he shoots me in the head, how am I going to walk over here? I'll be doing the dead man's flop."
"Right, Dad, sounds good. I got your back."
Jacob got out of the truck and climbed into the bed, excited with the possibility of bullets flying. Joke reluctantly loaded the deer into the back of his pickup, under orders from his father. Ray walked toward Bill, unflinching. Bill raised the barrel of the rifle, and Ray walked in a smooth pace, range-walk, as Ray called it, one of his military terms that no one understood in the family but him. Walked right up to the gun. The barrel touched point-blank against Ray's chest. Ray waited a second, offering Bill the opportunity to fire, and then he reacted in a jerk and ripped the gun away from Bill's hands and proceeded to beat the weapon against a tree until lock, stock, and barrel separated and fell to the ground. Both Bill and Joke backed away, allowing Ray to claim his deer. After dragging the buck out of Bill's truck bed, Ray took his time gutting it right in front of the Frye's, unzipping the chest of the buck and delving his hands into the body. The entrails remained on the Frye's driveway. All this happened without another word.
Jacob and Ray rode home together in silence. Together they strung the deer up in the shed. Ray gave Jacob his first beer, and then they laughed for hours, imitating the expressions on Bill Frye's face.
Some neighbor disputes start small and grow, some fester, but the Frye-Marak squabble was an open sore. The sixth Commandment and a mutual fear of hell kept them from calling for an old-fashioned duel to settle things. The nature of their disagreements transcended the men themselves, with worldviews and farming styles speaking for the men. The tidy Marak farm was buttressed against Frye's junkyard. On one property, a sober workman embraced his labor, owed nothing by this world, expected suffering and taxes, and spent his nights addled by anxiety over cattle and crop. On the other property was a profligate drinker unwashed and covered in grease, claiming to be owed by all, under a sense of being taken, scraping by each year collecting scrap iron and running pyramid schemes, laying in the shade after he scored a paycheck. They each had an idea of America, and it was two different countries. The only thing in common might have been that they each yearned for a reinstatement from the Lord of the old eye-for-an-eye doctrine.
Knowing this history, Jacob risked his life to cross the line into the Frye's pasture. One leg first, a hop, and then the other leg, being careful not to catch his crotch on the barb-wire. Trespassing. The grass had not changed, the trees were the same – but he was outside of the Marak line now and he felt it in his veins. He had done this many times at parties, crossing fences and scaring cattle, but this was always on distant properties, and at night.
A draw in the land led toward the Frye house, following a dogleg on the rolling valley floor. Jacob could not see the house. He followed the fence line on top of the east side of the hill that led into a sizable woods. Cow skulls and thigh bones littered the land on that side of the fence. He was no farmer, Bill Frye, even Jacob could see that. As Ray had mentioned plenty of times, Bill Frye could fuck up a wet dream. Worst of all, Jacob had done just that, twice, when he dreamed of one of his teachers, the new Social Studies teacher, fresh out of college. Weeds around the fence touched the wires and the posts, tall plants, still tall even after the first frost squeezed the life out. Never trimmed, the thistles grew wild all summer. No wonder another neighbor sued Frye for stray voltage, blaming it for killing the cattle and reducing the milk output. This other farmer had lost the case for lack of evidence, but was spot-on in that the Frye fence had more connections to the ground than posts. Every bull thistle a conductor. Jacob marveled at the mess. An outdoor museum of oxidation. Along the ground in the pasture, chunks of metal, old machinery, rims, chains, rolls of wire, scrap iron, broken chopper boxes – all of it rusted out from sitting in the elements for years. Looked as if Bill filled his manure spreader with junk and flung it around. He saw a pile of wood.
"You beautiful slob," said Jacob, observing the rotten stack of wood propped between two trees. He ran over and filled his arms. He carried it back toward the property line, giggling the whole way. He leaped the fence again, crotchwise, and dumped the armload of wood around the stump where he had left the axe embedded. After working the axe out of the wood, he tossed it aside and picked up the stump, bending under the weight and he hauled it to the fence line and heaved it on the other side, onto Frye's property. He hopped the fence again and rolled the stump until it gathered momentum and tumbled down the hill, far from the thicket, coming to a stop in the draw, where Ray would never find it when he returned to check on Jacob's progress.
On his way to the pile for another armload, he heard the sound of an engine in the pasture. He squatted behind an old discarded pile of tin to hide. A tractor wit
h a bucket loader wheeled about and the loping gait of cattle followed. The bucket of the tractor lifted up and the driver positioned it over a bunk feeder. The bucket tipped and a load of feed tumbled out. Cattle dove their heads and mouths into the feeder without waiting for the tractor to reverse and remove from the feeder. Jacob saw the driver's face.
"Joke!" he yelled, standing up and waving his arms. "Thank God, it's Joke, not Bill." He ran into the draw, gravity pulling his legs down the hill almost faster than he could keep up. Waving his arms, he caught the eye of Joachim Frye, who did not wave back, but started to drive the tractor toward Jacob. When they neared each other, Jacob noticed a Busch Light beer can in Joke's hand. An ungroomed beard and shaggy neckline surrounded Joke's pocked face. In his late twenties, he looked forty.
"Drinking and driving? You old dog, Joke, how the heck are you?"
Joke laughed when the boy stepped up onto the tire. "What're you doing over here," he said.
"You're not sore at me, are you, Joke? I know Bill and Ray got their thing."
"I ain't sore at no one."
"Me neither. Let the old men argue with each other."
"I got nothing against you and Ethan."
"That's what I say," said Jacob, "my thoughts exactly. The old generation, they got some problem with being happy. Joy-impaired bastards."
"That's right," said Joke, smiling. "What's going on? You're too old to run away from home again, at least on foot."
Jacob sighed. "No, not running. But I'd like to. The old man has me chopping dirt-packed stumps with a hatchet as a punishment for drinking beer. I see you have a beer there."
"Work beer," said Joke. "Want a drink?"
"No, I shouldn't," said Jacob. The cows threw the silage into the air with their mouths, letting it land on their backs. Jacob recanted. "Unless you got a fresh one. I don't want to drink backwash."
"Sure," said Joke, pulling a beer from a toolbox sitting by his feet. "Nothing like a warm beer on a rainy day."
"Thanks, Joke," said Jacob, opening the can and taking a swig. "Say, you know that old rotten woodpile over in those trees?"
"No," said Joke.
"You ain't gonna burn that wood, are you? I mean, it's falling apart."
"I don't know. Doubt it. Hop on the hitch, show me where it is."
Jacob jumped down from the tire and walked to the back of the tractor. He stood on the hitch and pointed to the trees. The tractor climbed the hill.
"Heck no," said Joke, "nobody's burning that wood since we got a proper furnace, what, ten years now."
"I've been out in the rain all day, since five o'clock this morning, chopping on those stumps. I think I'm coming down with a fever. My hands are ruined, take a look here," said Jacob, quickly showing Joke his single blister and then removing his hand. "I mean, those stumps can't be split, unless Paul Bunyan stands up out of the earth. But, I was thinking, it would be a good trick on Ray if I could move this wood over there. It's no good, this wood, except for saving my ass. What do you say to that?"
"If I help you," said Joke, "can I tell my old man? He'd get a kick out of it."
"Up to you."
"He'd get a good laugh."
"Make him laugh then, Joke. Help me load the bucket, will ya? Then we can dump a payload on the other side of the fence over there."
The two of them finished their beers and started throwing wood into the bucket until it piled high in the loader bucket. "Not too much," said Jacob, throwing out some of the wood. "Otherwise Ray won't believe his eyes." Joke drove the tractor to the fence and dumped the wood onto the other side where Jacob could retrieve it easily.
"There you go," said Joke. "That should make your Dad happy. Good enough?"
"Good enough for the girls I go out with," said Jacob, smiling, but then biting his thumb. "There's one other thing."
"What's that?"
"If all these stumps are still here, Ray will know I just grabbed the wood from somewhere else." Joke nodded but said nothing. Jacob clarified his aim to help Joke understand. "Shoot, I wouldn't suppose you could...no, I hate to ask. You already did me a favor."
"Naw, go ahead. What?"
"Never mind, Joke, you helped me out too much already."
"No, go ahead. What it is?"
"Forget it. I'd be taking a mile. You know, the old saying, give an inch…"
"Well," Joke said, "now I want to know."
"Joke, darn it, I couldn't ask you to help me lift all these stumps into the bucket and dump them over on your side. That would be too much. You've done enough."
Joke turned off the tractor. "Is that all?"
"All? These things are heavy. No need for you to get all dirty lifting these wet things into the bucket and taking them out of sight, just for me."
"What are friends for?" said Joke, hopping the fence.
Jacob wobbled his head and said, "Boy, I really owe you one, Joke. You old shirt-off-a-man's-back, teach-a-man-to-fish, son-of-a-bitch, you." He paused and grabbed Joke's shoulder. "You know, I guess there are some folks that really are going to make it into heaven."
"Sure hope so. Grab that end," said Joke, reaching for the first stump.
Jacob smiled. "On my count, lift. One, two, three!"