Winter Loon(19)

“Nothing,” I said. I turned my back to her but prepared to fight, to lay claim to this one thing. When I looked again she was in the doorway. All she said was that I was late for school. Her eyes were filled with suspicion and fever, as if I were hiding a ransom from her.



I REPLACED THE DISCARDED BEDDING with mismatched sheets and an old wool blanket I found in the hall closet. It stunk of first aid and something animal, and I hoped the smell of it would ward Gip off like a rope of garlic or twig of wolfsbane. The knife I slid into a slot along the wall, the point in the bed rail. I would spend sleepless nights on my side with my back to the wall so he couldn’t sneak up on me and often woke on my stomach with my arm tucked along the mattress, my fingers grazing the antler tang.



FOR HIS PART, GIP SAID only one thing. At the dinner table that night, he pointed to the thumbprint welt he left on my neck. Through a mouthful of meatloaf, he said, “Got a girl, I see.”

I didn’t want him to speak to me, to even look at me. “What?”

“Your neck there. Got a love bite. Tell me it’s that Rook girl chewing on you.”

Ruby glanced up from her plate. “Don’t look like love to me.”

The look he gave me, what was it? He was telling me that he remembered and that I had best forget. He popped out his shoulders, made himself big and me small. I wish now that I had stood up to him, called him on it right there, made him say in front of me and Ruby and God that he had been in that back bedroom time and again. But that’s not what I did. Instead, my hand went to my neck as if it were my problem, not his. Shame wormed up from the chair and took me over, entering me in the most primal of spots. I could feel it tighten and coil inside, a thing that should not be disturbed. I withered from the weight of it. Gip saw me give in, and I suppose he thought his secret would be kept.

“What a thing that would be, huh? Our grandson sticking it to that girl. Bet Burt Rook would love that.”

“You’re a pig,” Ruby said. She didn’t say it in a way that sounded angry or disgusted. It was simply a fact stated.

Gip shrugged and turned his attention back to his meal. I excused myself while my grandparents shoveled food into their open mouths, eating as if the hungry were at the door.





CHAPTER 7

SPRING TURNED TO summer, and there was still no sign of my father. School let out, and Gip got me signed on as a fourth hand at a farm outside of town, changing irrigation pipes and doing odd jobs. I was happy for the work and to stay out of the house, away from Gip and his dirty mind and dirty mouth, away from Ruby, who seemed to be drying up before my eyes.

Kathryn got her driver’s license and a shiny yellow car to go with it. She and I had an unspoken agreement that she would not come into my house and I would not invite her in. She told me early on that her father didn’t approve but that she’d do what she wanted, to hell with him. I can’t say she made much of an effort to go unseen.

Gip was all for me hanging around with Kathryn Rook. That alone should have put me off her. Any time he saw her leaning against her car in front of the house, waiting for me to come out, he’d say something lewd, even if Ruby was within earshot, about the way her lucky shorts rode up between her legs or how the gold cross on the chain she wore pointed to the promised land. Was he trying to goad me into a fight or make some kind of point? He would double pump his fist into the palm of his hand and tell me to go on and have fun. Walking out of their sad house, getting into Kathryn’s clean car, and driving away made me feel better than the both of them.

The Fullerton dairy was a big operation with 150 cows, give or take. They had almost three hundred farm and pasture acres for crops and grazing, a brick-red hip-roof barn for heifers and calves and winter hay, and a metal equipment shed for machinery, tools, and tack. Another lower barn had a milking parlor attached. Next to that, two concrete stave silos, a chicken coop, and an old open-front loafing shed. Four of us—me, Drew Fullerton, Bull Hightower, and Lester Two Kills—worked for Drew’s uncle, who owned the place. All four of Drew’s cousins had gone off to Vietnam, but only most of one came back. That one, Roger, spent his time indoors. Drew said he’d lost one leg and all his marbles over there and couldn’t take being outside. Drew was a quiet kid my age and mostly kept his head down, though his favorite thing to whisper was “motherfucker.” The first time Kathryn drove up in her new car, it was “motherfucker” in admiration. When he stepped in cow shit, “motherfucker.” I’d heard it so much from him, it got me thinking about the word in its parts, which brought up other stuff for me I didn’t like to think about. I’d asked him once to find a new word. “Yeah, alright, motherfucker,” he’d said with a grin.

Lester and Bull were both Indians, pals, it was clear from my first day. Lester was a year older than me and Drew, Bull a year older still. Lester I knew of from school, where he was a star basketball player and notorious loudmouth. He was tall and angled and wore his hair over his ears. His lips were flat and his mouth wide, especially when he smiled, which was often and ear to ear. Bull was shorter than me, but his chest was planked and broad. He could carry more weight than any of us, but we did most of the heavy lifting anyway since he was, for the most part, in charge of our crew. We did what he said.

It was a busy place that summer, us boys doing what we were told, changing pipes, readying the cows for milking, managing the hayrick. When the alfalfa was ready, we made hay—cutting, raking, drying, baling, and bucking. I was green compared with the others. I had to learn about farm machines and equipment, operation, and repairs, though Bull and Lester would never let me or Drew drive. In between, I lazed with the others, smoking cigarettes and bullshitting on the flatbeds. I bulked up that summer and grew like grass. My father would be impressed when he returned.