Part Thirty-Five

So, there’s not much to report except that he lasted there longer than at just about any other job he ever had. Nineteen months.

He fixed the barn roof, first, in the tentative spring sunshine, cutting up his hands pretty good on the sheets of tin.

He sheared the sheep – turns out he had a knack for getting the coat off quickly and in one piece. [“You should see him work a brassiere,” I mumbled when they told me this. They laughed.]

He brought in a hay cutting and handed Cassie tools when she fixed the tractor. He repaired fences. Helped Karen plant their truck garden and helped Anna vaccinate the sheep and when the money crops – organic corn, soy, and sunflowers – started coming in he watched over the seedlings like they were his kids.

One thing he didn’t do was live in the barn. Not for long, anyhow.

He came to Karen and said, walk this way.

They walked down the gently sloping front yard to the driveway and stopped at the far edge. There was a drop-off of about five feet right past the drive and then the lower fields, green but still a bit patchy. The sheep wintered there.

Haywood turned and pointed to the tottering remains of the goat shed, just off the drop-off from the driveway. “What’s that?”

It was a goat shed. Actually, it was a workshop for my grandfather, but when we got here we were going to start a goat dairy, and that was where the first goat lived.

[The goat died. And was a male anyhow. An early lesson on getting into agriculture when you didn’t know what you were doing.]

It’s got an electric line that ties in there, Preacher said, pointing to the cable. And running water. Most of the lumber’s still in good shape. It looks like hell, but there’s a lot to be salvaged there. I was thinking that I could rebuild it.

You want to live in the goat shed?

I want to see if I can replaced the goat shed with a shack for the hired hand.

A tenant shack? I don’t know if we want those sorts living that close to the house.

Beats the barn. You never know when one of them will get drunk and pass out with a cigarette in his hand.

I’ve never seen you drink or smoke.

I might start.

What would you need?

A lot. But you’d have something nice for the next hitchhiker you take in.

She thought about it. Making him sleep in the barn always made her feel a little guilty. OK, give me a list, she said.

He gave her the list. And worked on the place before, during, and after his other chores around the farm. They all remember him talking about it as his “Thoreauvian folly.” Karen remembers that when she came to see him working on it the first week, when he was just dismantling the thing and sorting the lumber into “usable” and “firewood” piles, he said this to her:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core.

She remembered distinctly that he recited the whole thing, softly, not really looking at her. Just pulling nails out of the boards while he worked. When he was finished he told her they should think about adding honeybees to the mix.

I sat on their front porch and looked past the tight, cozy little cabin down the hill, and at the white boxes in the field below, and the black specks that darted in and out of them. I thought about him memorizing Yeats and spitting it back out like that. For the first time in… for the first time ever, I missed him. Even as I recalled why I wanted to punch him in the face.

While he worked on the house the dog lay in the tall grass and watched him impassively. Occasionally Arthur would stir himself enough to chase a rabbit, but mostly he just watched.

The house went up. He dug a shallow foundation, just about a foot deep, and lined it with cinderblock. Anchored the house to treated 6x6s set deep in the ground – he dug the holes by hand, and Anna recalled that when he worked the posthole diggers with his shirt off it made her recall her heterosexual days with some fondness.

[At this Cassie glared at her. They all then laughed. They all swore they never touched him. I suppose I believe them.]

He put in a small window that peered across the surface of the driveway and two others that looked out into the fields. A Dutch door. The faucet turned into a shower head (cold water only; he said it was a simple, elegant solution to living with five lesbians) that stood above a concrete pad he poured. A little field drain below it.

No toilet. It was easier to just walk up to the house. Or use the weeds down near the stream.

The hay was cut; the sheep were sheared; the crops were planted, and grew, and the people who certify that things are “organic” were kept happy. Preacher’s cheerful, relentless approach to the hard work proved infectious and they started looking for things to do, buildings to repair, fields to tend.

Preacher offered to quit as the summer turned ungodly hot. You only needed me short-term. You’re caught up. I’m an unnecessary expense.

Do you want to leave?

No.

Then shut the hell up and get back in the kitchen. We’d keep you here just to cook.

Too bad, Ellen said, we can’t keep him barefoot and pregnant, too. Think about it. We underpay him, work the hell out of him, and take him for granted. In every other respect, he’s a perfect Georgia farmer’s wife.

I heard that, he said from the kitchen.

On a piece of yellowed paper in their kitchen they have his recipe for chocolate meringue pie. Every time he made it he gave them a lecture on the “spiritual symmetry” of chocolate meringue pie. The egg, he said, represents the soul. The chocolate takes three egg yolks. The meringue takes three egg whites. When you are shoveling down a piece of chocolate meringue pie – or two, if you’re Cassie – you are symbolically reuniting your soul.

They rolled their eyes and he would laugh delightedly. And he would scramble an extra egg and put it in Arthur’s feed dish, so the dog could have a treat, too.

And each night the dog went down the steps (he cut steps into the drop-off by the driveway, lined with railroad ties) behind Preacher and slept across the doorway.

They remember the one night very vividly, of course.

In August they got a check for their wool. Sort of. They had a deal with a Navajo co-op that used their wool and paid them, not for the wool, but a percentage of the proceeds they got from the sale of the blankets. After a year without getting any money at all Karen had decided they were either being robbed or had hooked up with the least-successful Navajo blanket-weavers of all time, and then suddenly there was a check in the high four figures sitting there in the mailbox.

That called for a celebration, and they were all tired of looking for things to do anyhow, so they piled in the pickup and went into Macon. Yes, where they live, Macon is the big city.

This was a day they all remembered vividly, and clearly, and their versions were enough alike that I wondered if they had rehearsed it. Usually if I ask five people to describe the same event – the same event from a dozen years ago – I get five different versions but here… here the only difference was in who came in second when they played miniature golf. Some said Cassie. Some said Donna.

Ellen had brought her softball bat and they went into the pitching cage and hit. She was impressed with Preacher’s stroke. She asked me if it was true that he was scouted by the majors. I broke my rule and told her: yes. I’ve seen the scouting reports.

She wasn’t surprised.

They went to the mall and ate pizza and (half-)jokingly tried to fix him up with the girl who worked at the record store. And then it was time to go home, and they were tired, and happy, and he rode in the back with Anna and Karen and Donna and they sang John Mellancamp songs.

They are all just old enough to still think of him as John Cougar, of course.

So they arrived home and tended to the livestock and gave Arthur a rawhide bone they’d bought. Then they retired to their respective locations, and Arthur took up his position in front of Preacher’s door, gnawing happily on the rawhide.

Arthur, not Preacher. One assumes.

Part of what happened next was related by Preacher to Anna to me, so allow room for error regarding his internal monologue. But late – around 2 a.m. – Arthur gave a low, guttural cough that roused Haywood. And he heard, over the sound of peepers and crickets, the faint squeak of worn brakes.

The pickup truck easing up the driveway, its headlights out, bore the three men from Southern States. For purposes of posterity their names were Gus, Michael, and Frank, but that’s not really important. Look at the archive, all the particulars are in there.

All three were pretty loaded. Whenever they got drunk Gus started thinking about the time the dyke bitch broke his nose, and they would talk about their revenge, and generally get too drunk to actually execute any of their intricate revenge fantasies. Generally, but not this time. This time beer money ran out too soon, and so Frank was piloting his truck up the driveway with the headlights out, while Gus and Michael giggled nervously in the front seat.

Both of them held Mason jars filled with gasoline, with a bit of tee-shirt sticking out from under the cap.

Preacher heard the faint pop of a stone under a truck tire and slipped out of the cabin with the softball bat in his hand. Saw the silhouette of the truck pass by above. And he said later that at that moment there was this terrible, frightening calmness that came over him, and in his head – and this part is so weird that it has to be true – he heard the opening notes of “Beyond Belief” by Elvis Costello. He said that everything he did for the next three minutes was perfectly timed with, choreographed to, that song, which played in his head like some ridiculously inappropriate soundtrack.

He climbed up the embankment onto the driveway and saw two figures standing outside the truck, bent over something. Then there was a flare of light and one of the men – Gus, as it turns out – screamed “Hey, Bitch,” and cocked back to throw the molotov at the nearby barn. And Preacher (as calmly and effortlessly, I’m sure, as he would swing at a 3-1 fastball) stepped into his swing and shattered the bottle, and the man’s hand, with one motion.

Gus screamed again, this time wordlessly, both at the searing agony in his mangled hand and at the burning gasoline that sprayed across him. Michael – still too drunk to make good decisions – stood there with his burning bomb still in his hand, but before Preacher could make a decision, Arthur launched himself from the shadows and latched onto the man’s arm. He dropped the bottle, which amazingly did not break, but simply rolled down the driveway, leaving a trail of burning gasoline from its leaky lid.

Light snapped on in the house and out of the corner of his eye Preacher saw Cassie running across the front yard. Michael ran down the driveway trying to shake the dog loose, and Preacher saw the cabin light come on in the truck as Frank started scrabbling madly through his glove compartment. Preacher advanced on the truck, Frank climbed out of the truck, Arthur was growling like a hellhound, Gus was still screaming, rolling on the ground to extinguish the flames, and the sound of the pistol cracked into the night sky. Preacher did a half-turn, then kept on advancing, but Cassie got there first. She slammed the truck door on Frank, he dropped the gun, she kicked it away, kicked his balls halfway through the roof of his mouth, then picked up the weapon.

She heard Preacher say “Arthur” loudly, commandingly, and Arthur gave Michael one last shake and then trotted back.

Cassie looked triumphantly over at Preacher as the others came down from the farmhouse, and saw him lying in the driveway. Karen cradled his head.

“Oh, fuck,” Ellen said softly. Anna reached into the truck and turned on the headlights. His blood looked black in the glare.