| Apparently Chevrolet only painted their trucks in two colors that year; brown and tan. The half-ton that Eleazar fueled and loaded was one of the lucky few blessed enough to be adorned with both. Though the years and the hard driving of El and his boss Abe had added rust and the shadows of dents to the exterior. The old Chevy had been their most faithful steed searching for calves in the timber or driving the sheep into the medow during the storms of the spring. Eleazar shut and reshut the tailgate three times before the latch caught with a sound resembling an objection, damn sheep. Abe saw the dust rise from the direction of the barn before he saw the chevy round the bend in the drive and make its way to the house. He heard the sounds of his hired hands working steers in the corale and a breeze swayed his grey beard and brought that familiar amalgam of scents, soil, manure, wildflowers and doubt. He turned to see Sarah standing on the porch; the wind sweeping her cotton dress, making it seem as though Sarah was dancing although he had rarely seen her so still. Her eyes, made even more blue in times of discontent searched his face for any forecast. She recieved none. He was a vault since the day he returned from the pond behind the sheep-pen. Abe had been going to the pond for years. Always alone, Sarah had never gone, not even Eleazar or Ike had ever followed his bootprints to the pond with him. He would spend hours sitting on the bank. Sometimes he would come back muttering disbelief, sometimes he would come back overjoyed, sometimes he would come back so angry that he would sit up all night just staring out into the blackness of the night, proving his metal to the expanse. She thought he must go there to pray, the cooks said to each other (out of miss Sarah's earshot), that he was haunted by the two, so he went down to the pond to beg their forgiveness. But this last time Abe came back different than he had ever returned before. He looked numbed and worn, like a punch-drunk fighter waiting for the knock-out right hook. Sarah knew immediately that the pond had won, it had beat him soundly. A chill inhabited the breeze and El unrolled his sleeze and fastened their pearl buttons. "I'll go get the boy," he said to both of them and neither of them. Abe held out his arm and shook his head while staring at the tops of his boots. Eleazar took that to mean that the collecting of the boy would be left to his father; he shrugged, leaned against the truck's grill and pulled a pack of Marlboro Reds from his breast pocket and watched the screen door swing shut behind Abe and Sarah. Abe walked past the sink and swiveled his hips to avoid the open drawer, Sarah followerd suit. He rustled Ike awake, "Truck's outside," then left the room, then the house. The boy stretched his thirteen year old limbs within moments was dressed with his hand on the screen door, shoving it toward fate. "Could rain," Eleazar managed to mumble to Abe while miraculously balancing the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Abe merely opened the driver-side door and stared west, over the hills, to the pond. Ike exploded out the door and tossed his duffel in the back atop the two "government green" army bags already there. "I'll ride in the back," Ike called with thirteen year old predictability and had a foot on the bumper before Abe could say "No. Ride in the front, with me." Ike abandoned his ascent and headed for the passenger door. El put a boot on the tire and swung his thin frame over the side of the bed. He folded his leathered body into a hunkered position with his back to the cab. All the while maintaining that effortless oral hold on his cigarette. Sarah watched from her window above the sink, beside the open drawer. Ike didn't try to talk to his father at all during the drive. He knew days in which his pops simply wouldn't talk--this was one of them. They plodded through the fields and pastures with as much care as Abe could muster. Pastures are rough, and one travelor was in the back. Eleazar could feel the bed of the truck move nearly independently from the cab, not a comforting feeling. Though Abe did his best, the chevy found enough terraces and holes to illicit more than a few "shits" and "damns" from the cargo. Normally Ike would have laughed. But something weighted the corners of his mouths like anchors. It was sculpted into the lines on his dad's face. Fret. Thats what mom would call it, Ike reasoned to himself. Fret. "Enough Dammit," El's exclamation and a particularly vicious bump roused Ike and he realized that he had been staring at his dad, letting the word fret own his father's face. Suddenly the truck the was stationary and Abe, Eleazar and Ike all looked up to see what they knew they had been traveling towards all along, the mountain. "We'll walk from here. You'll camp here, me and the boy will go up the trail as far as we can," Abe motioned to the immediate face of the mountain. "Fine," Eleazar responded as he unloaded the truck. Three duffels hit the valley's grass, then a small amount of wood for El's fire, then the axe. Abe and Ike stayed while Eleazar built his fire, stayed until he pulled out his harmonica and began to play. Eleazar had told Ike before that all the songs he knew were either about "getting hanged, or getting laid". Ike was sure this one had nothing to do with women. Ike moved first, grabbing the axe and his bag and moving towards the face of the mountain. Abe cast one last look at the fire then followed suit. Eventually the sound of the harmonica drifted away, the sound not strong enough to make the climb with them. Once the song was gone the world was gone, blown away by the wind, drowned in the pond. They climbed until they they neared the end of the tree-line and sat upon the anomoly that is level ground on the side of a mountain. Abe drew a breath to fill his sails, "Here," he said. They both dropped their packs and Ike leaned on the axe. He felt as though he carried more than his bag and a tool up the mountain, he was weakened by his father's fret. The mountain granted it animation and it had become an ever increasing burden to him. "We need wood," he heard his dad say, so he trudged into the trees. Away from the clearing he had the deepest desire to run. Fear seized his legs and nearly bested him. The mountain was terrible, it was breaking him, young as he was. But he remembered what his father had said before--that its a dangerous thing to look beyond the grasp of your hands. And in Ike's hands was an axe, an axe he needed to use to cut wood. He let the terror burn with the muscles in his back as he swung the axe over and over. His father cut his beard. That was the first thing he noticed when he brought back the wood. Abe's beard was gone, but he was not clean shaven, he had done an awful job. Ike noticed the instrument that had offered such a lack luster preformance, the old wooden-handled butcher nife from right-hand drawer beside the sink. "Your beard..." he started, but was interrupted. "Do you remember him?" Abe asked. "No," his son responded, he didn't need to ask who 'him' was. It was the same 'him' who had always been 'him' during all of his mother and father's conversations. "I was little when he..." Ike trailed off, his words dying like the sound of Eleazar's harmonica. "Hmm," was the only reply Abe gave, then he dropped the knife as if it were burning his hands. He stood and Ike set the wood down, "Let me see your hands." Sarah hadn't even tried to sleep that night. The look on her husband's face reflected every time she closed her eyes. She did her best not to blink. So she stood, bathed in the moonlight in her nightgown and clutching the hems of an old quilt tightly around her to nulify the bite of the wind. Her hair blew across her face, she made no effort to abade it. The pond had won, she told herself. The two had won. No man had ever loved her and maimed her as much as Abe had. Yet she had wounded him too. "The pond saves me and kills me," she said to the wind, the currier she hoped could relay the message to the pond to anounce her surrender. "What?" "Give me your hands." Ike again was confronted with the desire to flee down the mountain. This time it was not his resolve but his father's demand that held him in the clearing. He walked to Abe and slowly held out his arms. Abe bit his lower lip and grabbed the rope, don't answer anything he asks, he told himself. Years of tying steers had taught him the fasted way to bind two appendages. Ike recoiled and in his panic could not pronounce either his refusal or confusion. He tried to withdraw his hands but found his father's grip to be iron-strong. Abe continued with mechanical attention to the two ends of rope. The knot was tight. "Sit." Ike had begun to weep, the terror and confusion and the mountain finally breaking the boy. He tried to search his father's face for reason, as Sarah had done before but found none. "Sit," Abe repeated. Ike tried to run instead. Abe maintained his grip on his right arm and placed a boot behind the boys legs and shoved him to the ground, his head landing in what remained of Abe's beard on the clearing floor. More rope. Abe moved his hands to Ike's boots, and began to loop the rope around the boy's ankles with efficiency that bordered on boredom. Ike planted a kick in his father's gut. Abe reacted with a back-handed swipe across Ike's face. Ike tasted pennies in his mouth. The beard shavings were dusted crimson. Back to the boots. The knot was tight. Abe turned and went for the knife. "WHY? WHY? DAD WHY?" The boy's question exploded in Abe's head. Why indeed? Why be asked to do this, why the hate that this took? "Enough," Abe didn't mean to say it audibly, merely meant to steady himself, but the force of the word silenced Ike for a breath. Abe grabbed the knife and returned to his son, bound and bloodied on the ground. Ike didn't question anymore, he just wept, his cries were indeterminable. Abe turned the knife so the blade faced away from himself and the point faced his son's chest. Fear rumbled in Ike and his body responded, the smell of urine filled the clearing. Abe raised the knife higher still and shut his eyes while his own tears mingled with the snot on his son's face. In his mind Abe saw the two, starving and writhing in the desert. Without opening his eyes he turned his head and vomit poured out of his mouth. He lifted the tenant of the open drawer again and screamed into the night "FAITH". Isaac responded with a cry of his own, "NO." Eleazar could not hear the scream but the night had woken him with a sense of urgency and helplessness. He ran to the truck's cab to pull the .30/.30 from the gun rack. He didn't know what to do wtih it, who or what to shoot, or even what called his mind back from his dreams. So he stirred his fire and sat with the gun in his lap. Sarah dropped the quilt that was around her and fell face down in her yard. Her lips were coated with dirt and her tears cascaded onto the ground making mud. She tugged at her hair until strands came out between her fingers. She had heard neither cry but felt them both. Her heart was shredded. The next morning Eleazar had stowed the gun and was collecting his camp when he saw them come down. They didn't look like a father and son. It was merely an old man, moving slowly down the mountain, his face vacant. The individual that trailed him looked nothing like a boy, but like a wild animal, like a beast confined for too long, neither tame nor safe. They didn't bring their packs and the axe obviously didn't make the return journey. Abe brushed by Eleazar and slid into the driver's seat of the chevy. El moved to the back bumper but Ike had already leaped into the bed of the truck. Eleazar saw his lip was swollen and his wrists were bright red. Eleazar abandoned his post and sat down beside Abe in the cab. The mountain chased them all the way home. By the time the chevy pulled up the drive Sarah had collected herself off the front lawn. Dirt stained her nightgown and face and beneath her fingernails were trails of her scalp. Ike was out of the bed before the truck stopped and he sprinted to his mom and but stopped within ten yards of her. He instead turned and walked west, towars the pond. Sarah fell to her knees again, watching the rest of her heart seek the pond and its hopes, losses and joys. "I don't know what happened up there," Eleazar thrust a thumb over his shoulder as he spoke, "and I reckon neither do you." He paused to light a dangling Marlboro Red, "But you've changed, the boy's changed," he nodded towards Sarah collapsed sobbing in the yard, "she's changed, maybe for the last time. I gotta know why?" Abraham leaned his head on the stearing wheel, and wept, wept in the gray haze that filled the cab. "Alright then." Eleazar said, and the truck door slammed, leaving Abraham with the only one who knew why, the only one who knows why. |
