Plainsong (19 page)

Ike and Bobby.

In the early morning they woke in the same bed at almost the same moment, with the stain already visible and distinct above the north windows across the room. Ike got up and began to dress. Then Bobby got up and dressed while his brother stood beneath the water stain, looking out the windows past the well-house toward the barn and fence and windmill. Beyond the fence Elko was doing something to himself. Look at that crazy son of a bitch, Ike said.

Who?

Elko.

Bobby looked at him.

Then he was dressed and they went downstairs where Guthrie was drinking black coffee and smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table, and as usual on a Sunday morning, reading something, a newspaper or magazine opened to the sunlight on the table. Passing through the kitchen they went down off the porch and on across the gravel in a hurry. They opened the gate and stepped into the corral. But the horse wasn’t dead then. He was still only kicking himself in the stomach. He was standing off by himself against the barn, away from Easter and the cats, and the sweat was dark along his neck and ribs and flanks. While they watched he dropped down into the dirt and rolled, his feet kicking into the air like a black bug or insect overturned and crawling its legs, his belly exposed while he rolled, lighter colored than the rest of him, brownish, and then he grunted and stood up again and swung his long black head back across his shoulder to look at his stomach. Immediately he began to kick at himself as if he were tormented by flies. But it wasn’t flies. They watched him for another minute, until he fell down onto the dirt again beside the barn, then they ran back to the house.

Guthrie was at the stove, stirring eggs. Wait, he said. Can’t one of you boys talk at a time?

They told him again.

All right, he said. I’ll go look. But you stay here. Eat your breakfast.

He went outside. They could hear his steps on the porch. When the screen door slapped shut they sat down at the bare wooden table against the wall and began to eat, sitting across from each other, chewing quietly and then listening and looking at each other and beginning to chew again, their brown heads and blue eyes almost identical above the crockery plates. When he finished eating, Ike stood up and looked out the window. He’s coming back, he said.

I guess he’s going to die, Bobby said.

Who is?

Your horse. I guess he’s going to die today.

No he isn’t. Eat your breakfast.

I already ate my breakfast.

Well eat some more.

Guthrie came back into the house. He crossed to the phone and called Dick Sherman. They talked briefly. Then he hung up and Ike said: What’s he going to do to him? He’s not going to hurt him, is he?

No. He’s already hurt.

But what makes him do that?

I’m not sure.

Was he still kicking himself?

Yes. There’s something the matter with him. Something in his stomach, I guess. Dick’ll look him over.

I guess he’s going to die, Bobby said.

You be quiet, Bobby.

He could die though.

But you don’t know that. You don’t know anything about it. So keep your mouth shut.

Stop now, Guthrie said.

The two boys looked at each other.

Both of you, he said. And you better go get your papers started. I heard the train half an hour ago. It’s time you were leaving.

Can’t we do it later?

No. People pay on time and they want their papers on time.

But just this once? Dick Sherman’ll be gone already.

He might be. And if he is I’ll tell you about it. Go ahead now.

You won’t let him hurt him.

No, I won’t let him hurt him. But Dick wouldn’t anyway.

Anyway, Bobby said. He’s hurt already.

They went back outside into that early morning cold sunlight for the second time and walked their bikes out of the yard. They looked toward the barn and corral. Elko was still humped on three legs, still kicking. They mounted the bikes and rode out of the driveway onto the loose gravel on Railroad Street and east a half mile to the Holt depot.

When they were finished with their paper route they met again at Main and Railroad and rode home. It was a little warmer now. It was about eight-thirty and they were sweating a little under the hair on their foreheads. They rode past the old light plant beside the tracks. When they passed Mrs. Frank’s house on Railroad Street and then the line of lilac bushes in her side yard, the new little heart-shaped leaves beginning to open along the branches now, they could see the extra pickup was still in the driveway at home, parked beside the corral.

Anyway, Ike said, he’s not done with him yet. That’s Dick Sherman’s pickup.

I bet he’s still kicking, Bobby said. Kicking and grunting.

They rode on, pedaling over the loose gravel, past the narrow pasture and the silver poplar and turned in at the drive and left their bikes at the house. They approached the corral but didn’t enter; instead they looked through the fence boards. Elko was on the ground now. Their father and Dick Sherman were standing beside him, talking. He was down on his side in the corral dirt with his neck reached out as if he meant to drink at the barn’s limestone block foundation. They could see one of his dark eyes. The eye was open, staring, and they wondered if the other eye was open too like that, staring blindly into the dirt under his head, filling with it. His mouth was open and they could see his big teeth, yellow and dirt-coated, and his salmon tongue. Their father saw them through the fence and came over.

How long have you boys been here?

Not very long.

You better go back to the house.

They didn’t move. Ike was still looking through the fence into the corral. He’s dead. Isn’t he? he said.

Yes. He is, son.

What happened to him?

I don’t know. But you better go back to the house. Dick’s going to try to find out.

What’s he going to do to him?

He has to cut him open. It’s called an autopsy.

What for? Bobby said. If he’s already dead.

Because that’s how we find out. But I don’t think you want to watch this.

Yes we do, Ike said. We want to watch.

Guthrie studied them for a moment. They stood before him across the fence, blue-eyed, the sweat drying on their foreheads, waiting in silence, a little desperate now but still patient and still waiting.

All right, he said. But you ought to go up to the house. You won’t like it.

We know, Ike said.

I don’t think you do, son.

Well, said Bobby. We’ve seen chickens before.

Yes. But this isn’t chickens.

They sat on the fence and watched it all. For most of it Dick Sherman used a knife with a steel handle, which was easier to clean up afterward, and there wasn’t the problem of a wooden handle’s breaking. It was a sharp knife and he began by stabbing it into the horse’s stomach and working it sawlike along his length, sawing up through the tough hide and brownish hair and pulling with his other hand to open the cut wider. When the knife grew slippery with blood he wiped it and his red hands on the hair over the ribs. Then the yard-long incision had been made and Dick Sherman and their father began to peel back the hide, their father pulling the upper flap of skin and hair backward while Sherman shaved at it underneath, freeing the hide from the ribs and stomach lining, exposing a thin layer of yellow fat and the fine sheaf of red muscle. Dick Sherman was kneeling at the horse’s stomach with the knife and their father was crouched over his back. Both men had begun to sweat. Their shirts showed darker along the back and their faces shone. But they paused only briefly, routinely, to wipe their forearms across their shining foreheads, then fell to work again over the prone horse, whose one visible eye, as far as the boys could determine from the fence, had not changed at all but was still wide open, still staring indifferently into the blank featureless sky above the barn as if he didn’t know or didn’t care what was being done to him, or as if he had decided at last not to look anywhere else ever again. But Dick Sherman wasn’t finished yet.

He drove the knife into the groin inside the top back leg to cut through that big muscle so he could sever the tendon in the joint. Afterward, with their father’s help, the leg could be pulled back away, leaving the gut exposed and accessible. It took a while, stabbing and probing, to find the tendon and then to free the joint, but he found it finally.

Try it, Sherman said. See can you pull his leg back, Tom.

Their father took Elko at the back cannon and pulled hard, wrenching it, carrying the long fine-boned leg back and up so that it stood up now into the air almost perpendicular to his body, awful-looking, horrible. Sitting on the fence, watching it, the boys began to understand that Elko was dead.

The rich muscle at his groin where Dick Sherman had opened him lay thick and heavy and raw, exposed to view like steak. The hide had torn some when their father pulled and was bleeding along the tear. But now the gut could be opened. Sherman cut into the stomach lining. Then the yellow bags and the blue knots of stuff spilled out onto the dirt and the wispy manure. There was mucousy blood and fluid, yellow- and amber-colored. The transparent membranes shone silver in the sun.

Sherman said, Have you got a tree trimmer handy, Tom? I could use one.

In the barn, Guthrie said. He stood up stiffly and walked along the side of the barn into the dark center bay and returned with the two-handled double-clawed tool he used to cut tree branches and the spirea bushes around the house. He handed it to Dick Sherman.

Sherman laid his knife down. Pull the hide back again, will you? he said.

Their father crouched over the horse and with both hands pulled the hide back away from his ribs. Then Dick Sherman began to cut through the ribs with the tree trimmer, one rib at a time, making a crack each time like a dry stick breaking; he was exposing the chest cavity. The boys understood then that the horse was dead completely. He couldn’t live through that. Watching it, their eyes grew round in their heads and their faces paled. They sat utterly still on the fence.

When enough of the ribs had been cut through, their father pulled the loose flap of the chest wall back so that Dick Sherman could examine the heart and lungs. He lifted them in his hands, turning them, poking and exploring with the knife. There was nothing wrong with the heart. Nor with the lungs. He probed with the knife into the aorta and large veins to look for scar tissue from worms but there wasn’t any; the horse had been thoroughly wormed. So he moved back again to the gut and raised the entrails, reaching into the stomach and lifting out more of the moist yellow intestines. He was straining hard now, wrenching the heavy insides out of the horse, and apparently more of it was coming than he wanted because he was discarding some of it, searching and lifting at it while it squirmed and tried to fill in, and then he had some of the bowel and it was too big and too dark entirely and he stopped.

There, he said. See that? That big dark part, kind of bluish-black?

Guthrie nodded.

He had a twisted gut. That’s what killed him. Sherman held it up in his hands, displaying it. Below here where it twisted, the gut died. That’s why it’s so black and bloated and off-color. He released the dead intestine and it folded into place among the rest as though it were alive. Poor bastard, he suffered enough.

The two men stood up. Dick Sherman bent and stretched, unkinked his legs and reached his arms over his head, while Tom Guthrie stood behind the gutted horse, looking at the two boys. They were still sitting as before, on the top board of the fence. You boys all right? he said.

They didn’t say anything but merely nodded.

You sure? Maybe you’ve seen enough.

They shook their heads.

All right. The worst part’s over anyway. We’re almost through.

It was past midmorning now. The bright sunlight of a Sunday morning toward the end of April. And Dick Sherman was saying, We need some baling wire, Tom. Or twine. Twine’d be better.

So their father left the corral to enter the barn once more and returned again, with twine this time, two or three long yellow strands of it. Sherman took the twine and began to close Elko’s stomach. Starting under the chest he knifed a hole into the hide and drew the twine through the hole, knotted it, carved another hole opposite the first and pulled the two flaps of hide together, then moved back six inches and did the same, again and again, moving backward, pulling it tight each time, while their father helped to push the rich organs and slick intestines into place, holding them there until the twine was tight. Soon his hands were as red and slippery as Sherman’s. When they had closed Elko’s stomach as well as they could they wound the twine around the top back leg and drew it down again, so it no longer stood up above the horse’s body, and secured it to his other back leg, then they tied some knots and called it good.

The horse lay in the dirt beside the barn with his eyes and mouth open, his neck reaching out and his long brown stomach crosshatched with yellow twine. From the fence, though, the two boys could still see the dark bloody insides of him through the ragged gap of hide because Dick Sherman and their father hadn’t been able to close the cut completely. There was too much of it. It was like a hole in the ground when so much earth has been opened that you can’t put all the dirt back in place again. Some of it still shows; the scar is still there. So the two boys could still see into Elko, and even what was no longer visible before them was still there in memory for recollection at night whether they wanted to recall any of it ever again.

But it was late morning now, approaching noon. The two men had risen from their work, stiff and sweaty, and had gone to the horse tank in the corner of the corral to wash their hands and arms under the spill of cold wellwater that ran through a cast-iron pipe from the windmill. Then Dick Sherman cleaned his knife and their father washed the tree trimmer. Finally both men stooped under the trickle of cold water, scrubbed their faces, drank and stood up again, dripping water down their necks, and wiped their mouths and eyes across their sleeves.