The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories (13 page)

Now this eccentricity grated on Harold's nerves like a rasp on glass, so he used it as a convenient excuse to take up with a platinum blonde who bought peroxide at his drugstore. The friendship flourished into an affair, and soon Harold was away on business trips almost every weekend. In fact, business became so good that he was often called away in the middle of the week, and Emma began to think she had married a traveling salesman instead of a druggist.

But she was good-natured, innocent, and never suspected anything amiss. She spent her lonely evening boxing and bundling things that had come into her daily life, and chatted happily away with her beloved pets—a Scottie dog named Jack, a cat, a canary, and seven goldfish with no names whatsoever.

Harold was a simple man by nature, and after a while he decided that his modern way of life was setting too fast a pace for him and had become too complicated. One of his women would have to go, and it wasn't going to be the blonde, even though she couldn't cook.

He didn't want to kill Emma. This wasn't because he was sentimental, but rather because he was squeamish and had a weak stomach. Besides, he had long toyed with the idea of whether it was possible to drive a person to insanity. If anyone could do it, Harold was sure he could.

Emma had quite a little money, which, naturally, she kept, and Harold wanted to be sure the money would be placed under his supervision when Emma went off the deep end. He would need the extra cash for two fares to Bermuda.

Harold started off his project by instilling in Emma's mind doubts about herself. She wouldn't be able to find one of her shoes; it would turn up in a pan with a lid on it inside the oven. He hooked up a special switch into the electrical wiring so he could control the light in her bedroom. She would turn off the light, go to sleep, and when she awoke in the night the light would be on.

Harold had half a dozen such plots and devices going simultaneously and continuously. But about the only effect his scheme had on Emma was that her saving instinct had taken on a new intensity. She had actually begun to save the scraps of food from the dinner table, sealing them up tight in quart jars. Now, although this should have been an encouraging sign, the more she saved the more pleasant and calm she became.

Harold knew that if his plan were to succeed in a reasonable amount of time, he would have to deal a shattering blow to his wife's joviality.

This brought about the weird incident with the dog, Jack.

One evening, Harold brought home from his drugstore some arsenic powder and stored it in the medicine cabinet. The next morning, Jack ate breakfast in his usual hurried fashion, rolled over on his back, and passed away. Emma was stricken with sadness at the loss of her pet. No longer was the light of joy in her eyes, and she sat in her chair in the great, old house—the dark and dusty and crammed-full house—and rocked the dead dog Jack back and forth, back and forth in the living room.

Harold smiled to himself as he went out the door for a three-day trip, but it was an uneasy smile that hung faint and timid on his lips.

Returning home later in the week, he stepped nonchalantly into the living room and leaped halfway to the top of a stack of old catalogs, sending a box of empty ink bottles clattering to the floor.

“What in hell is that?” he screamed at his wife.

“Jack,” she said.

“Jack!” he yelled, the hair lifting on the back of his neck.

“Yes,” she said. “I had him stuffed.”

It took Harold several days to grow accustomed to the glassy and accusing stare of Jack, but he knew he must hurry if he were to take advantage of his wife's low spirits, which had already picked up remarkably and were almost back to their normal jovial state.

It was the cat's turn next to play its role in Harold's little drama. The cat ate its breakfast, looked disturbed, and died. Harold went off on a trip. When he came back, he didn't flick an eyelash at the cat curled rather stiffly in its usual place in front of the hearth. But an almost imperceptible chill, like an ant with cold feet, crawled up his back.

Next came the canary. One day it was dead, and the next it was back in its cage, still and silent on its perch. And, worst of all, the death of the bird seemed to have absolutely no effect on Emma.

The stuffed menagerie, however, was beginning to make Harold nervous, and he felt a powerful urge for haste in his weird task, and a yearning for well-lighted and distant places where people kept nothing at all.

And then it happened. The goldfish were waiting belly up in their bowl one morning when Harold came down for breakfast, and this was strange indeed, for he hadn't poisoned the goldfish!

While he sipped his coffee and contemplated this turn of events, Emma bustled here and there about the kitchen. She scooped the goldfish from their bowl with a tea strainer and hurried across the room to a cabinet that was stacked with the usual conglomeration of bottles, glasses, and vats, most of which contained some preserved and cherished perishable that had entered into the life of Emma.

“What in hell do you think you're doing?” Harold said in his usual dull and acid voice. He sipped his coffee.

“Pickling my goldfish,” she said happily. “Yes, pickling my goldfish. It would be so terribly sad to bury them in the ground and never see them again, never, never again, until the world stops and all is lost forever.”

Harold looked at Emma keenly. Could it really be? He poured himself another cup of coffee, which tasted terrible this morning, but he hardly noticed. Could it be that all this time his wife had actually been insane, and he hadn't noticed it? She had been off her rocker all along. Why, it was so obvious now. No sane person would keep things the way she did. He watched her hurry to the other side of the room, and he smiled. Perhaps he would start proceedings for her commitment to an asylum that very morning. Well, maybe he would wait until the afternoon, because he really wasn't feeling too well.

He sipped his coffee. Emma was going briskly about her task across the room. She had finished pickling the fish. He watched her and forced himself to smile, despite the hot glow in his stomach. Bermuda, he thought. I'll leave tomorrow. His neck felt rather stiff this morning, and the hot Bermuda sun would be good for it. He sipped his coffee, but his hand shook, and he sloshed coffee on the table. Harold stopped smiling, and he wondered how long it would take for the world to end, and what would become of all the long-lost things when the end came. And he slipped forward onto the table now, and thought somberly about the dog, Jack, and the cat, and canary, and the seven goldfish. Emma was just a fuzzy silhouette, bustling about her task across the room. She worked briskly, happily humming some queer little tune. Harold watched her and waited.

She was emptying out the deep freeze. It was quite a large deep freeze.

September Song

A

ccording to the poet T.S. Eliot, April is the cruelest month. I have never found April to be particularly cruel. For me, at least, as a youth, September was the cruelest month. After a summer of running wild and free, suddenly I found myself confined in school. During the latter days of August, I had somehow beguiled myself into thinking school might be fun that year, even though I had no evidence on which to base this theory.

Certainly our teachers did not regard their jobs as intended to keep their youthful charges entertained. After the first hour of listening to our English teacher go on and on about the horrors of dangling participles, which, as I recall, turned out to be some kind of South American tree lizard and better left to the biology teacher, I realized I had been seriously mistaken about school being fun. The thought of nine months of this tedium was almost more than I could bear. Only one thing preserved my September sanity: grouse season!

Every year, grouse season opened the first of September, the only hunting opportunity since the previous November when my stepfather and I ventured out on Thanksgiving Day in our annual quest of a winter's supply of venison. My recollection, enhanced by half a century and more, is that obtaining said supply of protein consisted of little more than going out in the woods and standing around for an hour or so until a deer showed up. It was not exactly the kind of hunting I had read about in the outdoor magazines, which consisted of spraying yourself with scent and rattling horns, climbing a tree to a deer stand, and that sort of thing. Grouse season, on the other hand, was real hunting. My friend Norman and I may have missed a day of hunting grouse during those distant cruel Septembers, but if we did, I cannot recall it.

Norman and I would plan each evening's hunt during our ride home on the school bus, which actually wasn't a great place to plan anything. Two of the smaller kids would get into a fight and be thrashing around on the floor and some of the older kids would be egging them on, and finally Ed Schramm, the bus driver, would stop the bus, come back down the aisle, grab each of the fighters by the nape of the neck, hold them up in the air kicking and screaming, and say to me and Norman, “Where you boys hunting tonight?”

We would reply, “Probably this side of Sand Crick, Ed.”

He would be holding the two fighters out at arm's length and say, “Well, I hit that side pretty hard last night and didn't see much of anything. I'd try the other side, if I was you.”

I'd say, “Thanks, Ed, we'll probably do that.” Then Ed would haul the two screaming brats to the front of the bus and toss them out the door. As I say, the school bus wasn't the best place in the world to plan a hunt, but Ed was always willing to help out if he could.

Norman got off the bus about a mile before my place, so he always got a jump on our hunt by half an hour or so. He hunted with a single shot his folks had bought for him brand-new out of a mail-order catalog for about $8. Norman said he preferred that model of shotgun over all the other models, possibly because it could mow down trees and maybe even a barn, if it got in the way. It sounded like a cannon when it went off, and Norman's eyeballs would pop out about half an inch from the recoil. He almost never missed a grouse, but sometimes about all we could find of it were feathers, some of them still drifting down out of the air.

When it came to my gun, I had to make do with a hand-me-down. My mother had married a Frenchman a few years back, and while he was trying to get on my better side, he gave me a French-made side-by-side with engraved barrels and a carved stock. It had been handed down to him by his father, who had emigrated from France. The gun worked all right even if it didn't come mail-order, and I was happy to have any gun at all, even a French one. One thing I'll say about Norman, he never put on airs about having a mail-order gun and one that could mow down trees with a single shot and sounded like a cannon when it went off.

After I got off the bus, I would run all the way down to our big old farmhouse, bang through the front door, grab my gun and a pocket full of shells, scoop up a hot cinnamon roll from a batch my grandmother had just dumped out to cool on the kitchen table, then go out the back door and jump from the porch to the ground with Gram coming out behind me waving a butcher knife as I fled across the back pasture, headed for the crick.

I crossed the crick on a beaver dam. Crossing cricks on beaver dams was an art form in those days, and if you were good at it, you could make it across without getting a foot wet, even while munching a hot cinnamon roll, a hunting technique all but forgotten nowadays.

Those September grouse hunts were all glorious, but one in particular stands out. It provided one of those moments in time that never fade from memory. Norman and I met up half a mile or so down crick and were moseying along a side hill when we came upon Rancid Crabtree, a rank old woodsman who lived in a little cabin back against the mountain. Indeed, we could smell him before we caught sight of him, although this wasn't particularly unusual.

“By golly,” Norman said, “I think we're downwind of Rancid.”

Rancid was in a rage when we got to him. He was holding his shotgun in two pieces, the stock in one hand and the barrel in the other. He seemed glad to see us, apparently so that his ranting would at least have an appreciative audience.

“What happen,” he said, sitting down on a nearby log, “me and Wuff was comin' down that steep trail from the Walkers' farm when we come to a skonk. Now you boys know how much ah hates skonks. Wahl, Wuff hates 'em twice as much. Fust thank ah knows, he's tearin' after the skonk. Thet skonk, though, is a sly, old fellar and wiggles his way into a patch of brush. The brush slows Wuff down and finally stops him cold. The skonk is now firin' at him point-blank. Ah would of blasted it, but ah was a feared of hittin' Wuff, so ah wades into the brush and now the skonk had got me in its range and ah'm almost blinded, but ah swings maw shotgun at the critter. Jist than ah steps into a patch of wet clay from thet spring up the hill, go down flat on maw belly, and whacks a log with maw gun. Broke it in two pieces. The skonk wiggles off scot-free, but him and me is gonna meet up agin, ah kin tell you thet! Iffin ah could of got maw hands on him, ah would've choked him to death.”

“Gosh, Rance,” Norman said, “I think a skunk would be about the worst thing in the world for a person to choke.”

“Yer right about thet, Norman! Ah guess it depends how mad the skonk makes you in the first place. Chokin' a skonk ain't somethin' you spend any time thankin' about, thet's fer dang shore.”

Having had considerable experience with skunks, I tried to give Rancid some advice. “I got sprayed by a skunk last summer, Rance, and my mother made me sit in a tub of boiling water while she poured a whole gallon of vinegar over me. You should give it a try.”

“Maybe ah will. On t'other hand, thar ain't no point in bein' hasty about a thang like thet. If the smell don't wear off by spring, ah'll thank about tryin' what you said, Patrick.”

It was from this experience with Rancid that Norman and I learned the importance of the terms “upwind” and “downwind.” We found this bit of wisdom a whole lot more valuable than learning about some stupid South American tree lizard.