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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781625340283 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Massachusetts Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2013 |
| Series: | Arab Human Development Report |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
Read an Excerpt
Some Kinds of Love
Stories
By Steve Yates
University of Massachusetts Press
Copyright © 2013 Steve YatesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62534-028-3
CHAPTER 1
Starfall
In 1833, our village was ten white homesteads gripping the banks of green Niangua River mixed in with several huts of Delaware Indians who came and went depending on seasons we whites didn't bother to understand. For the rare traveler there existed nothing of account here save Fleat's meager store and the blacksmith's. But it was not long before the road that wound from Potosi and Iron Mountain down into the lead-ridden wild of the Ozarks bore word of a surpassing beauty, the blacksmith O'Bannon's daughter, Polly. Though she was promised to the Widow Fleat's son, there came through Niangua aroused ramblers whose burning eyes combed the sap on new split logs and the gaps in puncheons that passed for porches.
From cabins and the dirt lane, those lustful gazes met scowling men and boys who when asked never kept a chaw of tobacco save what was in their mouths and knew only two directions to give—forward into the woods or back the way you came. Unless you had a horse that needed shodding or a dull plow blade, Niangua would not allow the O'Bannons to be bothered.
That spring a stranger came to the Fleat Store at Niangua, dripping wet and looking to hire a horse. Men gathered at the stove guessed him to be seventeen years and kept their own counsel at seeing his nose like an Indian's but not like any Delaware's. Dark skin and knotty veins roped around hard muscle on his arms. He wore nothing like Indian clothes. Instead he sported new denim trousers with the waist folded down to make a sash and a shirt that must have once belonged to a city gentleman, for it bore mussel-shell buttons shimmering.
It was a prime morning to be at the store—a new stove had arrived from Springfield, made by real, live Germans in a foundry. The preacher Boom Middleton was on hand, and Nahum Hurley, Sag Coker, and the tanner, and other eminences, a banner day when the stranger entered.
Greasy buckskins shifted on legs and backs. Bare feet, clay-red hands, and faces grayed by smoke turned to him. Old Niles, asleep in the cane-backed rocker with the head and hide of a catamount protecting his withered hand and arm, opened one eye, blue and filmy as a cave fish, and swam it in its socket toward the sound of the stranger's dripping.
Behind the counter Mrs. Nimrod Fleat, widow of the store owner, glared at him from beneath her cedar split bonnet, so fat she was an Ozark mountain atop which God had planted two eyes like galena and a starving, little mouth. There dismantling the old stove, her loyal son Pilate paused in his mechanical theatrics.
The newcomer's eyes held brown in their depths, but a green bespattered each of them. No other family in Greene County could claim such. A pilgrim and a stranger in a wearisome land, he had by the look of him traveled a long way and through water, too.
"A draft horse," he said.
"What you want to haul?" asked Middleton, teeth green from chewing plantain.
"Millstone off that river back there." The cuffs of his trousers were rolled and below them his calves were bloody with black leeches squirming.
"Haw," laughed Middleton. "No mill round here."
"That's the idea," he said.
All went quiet. Middleton spat. Many joined him. In Niangua, interesting company could be borne, so long as that company did not carry torches and rope.
Polly O'Bannon strode to the open door, unescorted by any of O'Bannon's boys. She halted. Seeing her townsmen gathered and spying some new fellow standing there soaked, she eased into the store. Any other Niangua girl would have hollered out, "Excuse me," or "My, so many of ye!" But not Polly. She stood as tall as any man in that store. Her gingham dress sparkled with coke dust from where she had recently whistled at the bellows to O'Bannon's smithy. Loosened to rest at the back of her head, her bonnet crumpled, and her sand-colored hair swirled as if she meant to come with it that way.
The stranger didn't even glance at her, though everyone else in the store pulled hats off their heads. Widow Fleat beamed, then knocked Pilate in the back of the leg with a shoo-fly. Holding a bolt and blinking, Pilate asked, "Miss O'Banyon?"
Still the new fellow did nothing but stare at Middleton, the man who had laughed at him.
And Polly, for the first time in local recollection, squinted at a stranger before edging through the dumbfounded collection of hillbillies to the counter.
"I need Sobriar's Liniment, a pair of wool stockings, and cheesecloth."
Pilate nodded and leapt to the task.
Taking a deep breath and nearly crushing his hat in his hand, Middleton raised his voice. "A mighty project, your millstone," he said. "Take a team, don't you bet, Hurley?"
Nahum Hurley ran the mail service and was known to keep at least three horses when his cards remained royalty for long gambling stints. "I'm saying," Hurley confirmed. "But ain't any of mine going to be hauling no millstone out of the river."
"What would you want to pay with, tad?"
With Polly there, much attention was drifting away from Middleton and his challenge to the newcomer. The edge of the store counter nipped a sweet line in her dress across her flat, virginal abdomen. Yet her blue eyes, which in any transaction usually stayed front and centered on a spot of nowhere above Widow Fleat's grubby bonnet, cast sidelong at this new fellow, who was dribbling water and getting angry.
"Roma," he said. "Roma's the name. And any man lends me horse or team will be my partner in the mill for life."
"Hoo, now, there's a prospect," Middleton said, to general laughter.
"Maybe Mister O'Banyon's Percheron," offered one of the assembly.
There was quiet all around. Polly began tapping a finger on the countertop.
"Ain't you heard?" Hurley said with authority. "That horse has the whirling staggers. O'Bannon may as well put him down."
In the silence, Pilate stopped short of placing Polly's merchandise on the counter and stared at her.
She counted out her coins—an O'Bannon wouldn't owe even the man she was due to marry. "That horse is no concern of any of you all," she said, and turned away with her liniment and goods.
Roma blocked her path. "May I please see that horse?"
"Oh, he's a horse doctor and a miller, now," Middleton said.
For a moment the young lady was bottled. Her face reddened in frustration. No one had ever barred her way before. Pilate gonged at the stove joint. Once that dusty bonging shook the store, even the Widow Fleat seemed to notice that in the light of this Roma's face and fine build, her Pilate sure seemed pale and gangly and not so great a prize for the beauty of Niangua.
"You get out of my way," Polly said, recovering.
Delaying her still, he asked, "Will you be taking me to the horse?"
After no answer came, he stepped aside. She went out the door as carefully as she had entered.
Behind the counter came a rumble of phlegm. "You best show us that millstone," said Mrs. Nimrod Fleat, as if she could be removed from behind that counter and brought through heat and hollows to Niangua River for any reason save her own burial. "O'Bannons ain't got time for the likes of you."
All turned on Roma. And he coldly looked into each set of eyes. Then for the first time he glanced down at his shins where leeches wagged as if swimming upstream in a crimson river.
"Have you a spittoon I can buy?"
"Many," said Widow Fleat.
"Well water?"
"Till you're flooded."
Reaching in his shirt he fetched up a satchel on a thong strapped around his neck. He plucked from it a Spanish gold piece shining. In a flash of his hand Middleton pinched it from him.
"Why, Widow Fleat, it is real!"
"I can see that from here. Pilate, you get that boy a spittoon down."
"And fill it with well water, please," Roma said.
Pilate dropped the stove pipe in a cloudy gasp and chugged across the store.
Sitting on the dirt floor, the stranger, Roma, pulled off the leeches, one by one, and dropped them each into the spittoon of well water. All gathered watched him very closely. Some of the leeches hung on tight, and he stretched them, pulling, before they popped loose of his leg leaving bulging droplets of dark blood. From the crowd came a flurry of advice, but soon the deftness of his long fingers, plucking and working at the leeches, brought silence. Some onlookers lay on the dirt floor, and the rest kneeled or sat. The Widow Fleat strained to see over the counter, and Pilate picked at his bottom lip with a sooty finger. All began to admire the stranger at work. His shins and feet were covered in the black creatures. Delicious were the minutes as they passed.
"Have you a barber in the town? A doctor?"
All eyes rose up to Widow Fleat and Middleton.
"You a barber?" Middleton asked, with a different tone, as if seeing this operation made him recognize the civic value of a skilled practitioner.
With the last leech squirming in his fingers Roma eyed Middleton until the older man glared and went sullen. "You know my name, sir," Roma says. "What is yours?"
There was a long quiet. Outside the sizzling of katydids sounded like snakes rattling in cane. "I am Reverend Boom Middleton."
Roma let the black leech slide down the brass lip of the spittoon and vanish. It made a sound in the well water like a drop falling in a deep cavern. "Pleasure to meet you, sir."
Raising her puffy arm like a wing, Mrs. Nimrod Fleat motioned the reverend to her with several swoops of her hand, and these sent waves through her abundant body. The two whispered.
Then Reverend Middleton said, "I believe I'll go with you to see about this mill wheel."
All gathered to follow Middleton, even Pilate, excused by his mother.
From the dirt lane someone hollered: "Where you headed, Reverend?"
"To the river."
Such a crowd moving through Niangua did nothing but draw. In no time urchins with cane poles skipped alongside Roma, staring at him, and little girls with filthy feet dragging a shirt or smock as an excuse for washing arrived, and hounds spinning and dancing, a happy pig, two Delaware squaws with gazes lowered, the village idiot gaping and counting, all going down to the river, following Reverend Boom Middleton and the stranger, almost all of Niangua traveling, save massive Widow Fleat and the O'Bannons.
So much Grace had fallen to the O'Bannons that they knew to disdain from any ruckus larger than Sunday worship. To Niangua, the O'Bannons were cut of the finest cloth. Their two cabins were double-penned with dogtrot breezeways. Their yards were swept, and their pigs and fowl stayed in them. They might ride all day to Louisburg just to visit with proper folk. In Niangua the O'Bannons went to the store and to church and that is all. No door did they darken, no favor did they ask, no roof did they help thatch, no cellar did they sweat to sink with any neighbor. When they embarked on their own tasks the old blacksmith, four boys, and the beauty Polly O'Bannon finished them as a unit and remained beholden to no one, a pinnacle Ozark family. For lucre, or meat, or sometimes vegetable matter, the boys gladly shoed any horse, mended any wagon trace, straightened any plow. Old O'Bannon clanged and pounded at the anvil and sang his hymns at tremendous volume. And pretty Polly, her bluchers smacking dung, steadied any beast being served while hillbillies drooled, agog.
Near the river the procession met the McConnell twins. They carried a catfish yoked between their shoulders. To haul it—it was as fat and long as a woman's thigh—they had honed a cedar and speared the fish through its gills. It was a blue cat rarely seen in Niangua River at any size. From each gill and down its slimy iron side, blood streamed.
"How in the world?" asked Hurley.
"Yonder is a piece of the moon," said Antrim McConnell. "God flung it down in a circle."
"Has a spell on it that brings fish to gander," said Cork McConnell. "We found it abandoned. By river rules it is our'n."
The parade paused and many eyes settled on Roma.
"That's some fish you have," he said, stepping forward.
"What of it?" asked Antrim.
"What sort of Indin is this?" Cork inquired.
"Will you please call on me at the store after you gut that?" Roma asked, and dared to stroke the monster's white gullet with his thumb. "For I lost me a beautiful ring, a family heirloom, irreplaceable, near that stone. Where it fell, the shadow of this leviathan passed."
Cork and Antrim's eyebrows raised and, being twins, they did not have to exchange a glance and assess. "We'll be sure and find ye."
After they passed us and pushed on up the hill, the McConnells broke into a jog.
Through a purple stand of poke and fans of sumac still green, down a trail where mud became brown and stones grew slick, Roma traced the catfish's blood. Soon the stone glowed on the opposite bank clamped in the roots of a soaring beech tree. From beneath it the shattered remains of a dealwood raft jutted, decorated with bright green blades of water sage and red silt. In three bolts, thick rope twined from the hole in the stone's middle. The limestone of the immense circle glowed like a piece of the moon and below it grass pickerel, bass, bream, suckers, and catfish swooned, dodging and nipping, fighting amongst one another and battling the current to adore the glowing thing on the shoreline.
"Haw," Middleton laughed. "What you aim to do now? The twins claimed your millstone."
Without a moment's hesitation, Roma launched himself from the bank in a dive, then swam Niangua River in six strokes. Gripping one of the ropes he raised himself to stand on the millstone, which glimmered a deeper gray as water flowed off him.
One of the Delaware squaws sighed deeply, unmistakably besotted with desire.
"I found a millstone on Niangua River abandoned," called Roma in a voice as bold as old O'Bannon's. "By your river rules, then, it is mine."
"You aim to sleep on it? Or will you raise it by conjuring?" Hurley hollered out, hooking his thumbs in his threadbare vest.
Roma swam back across scattering a feast of fish.
At the river's edge Middleton opposed him, scraping a toe along the bank. "It will again be a stone without an owner, without claimant."
Dripping, Roma said nothing to him but bypassed him and nodded to the squaws. In their very own language he consulted, and though the crowd leaned to hear them talk, they could tell nothing but that the two squaws were charmed.
With no coin or token passing between them, Roma and the squaws settled the deal with an Indian shake, forearms touching and hands clasped nearly at the elbow. Then both squaws lifted their smocks and stepped out into Niangua River, lumbering across to rise up on the stone.
"Reverend, will you show me now to O'Bannon's Percheron, please?"
"Indian claimant don't mean nothing in Niangua," Hurley said.
"No time better to swim out there and test your local custom," Roma said.
Across the river, one squaw drew on her belt and delivered a gutting knife shining and set this plainly beside her and her sister on the millstone's edge.
Middleton and all were severely quietened at this revelation. The Reverend fixed his hat on his head then lead the gaggle up from the river toward O'Bannon's.
Nearing the smithy, the crowd heard Tate O'Bannon hollering and fell into a sprint.
At the split rail fence to O'Bannon's yard, there was Polly. In her hands was the trace. Pulling at it, O'Bannon's Percheron frothed and snorted and shook his gray head. That horse had dragged by sledge from the river huge stones to fashion O'Bannon's porch; and he had heaved O'Bannon's giant anvil through wood and valley, over hill, all the way from Iron Mountain where French Camp's forges blazed. For Niangua to see that animal raging mad with pain was to see a favorite hillside cloven by temblor, or see a beloved river run opposite for days. Tate O'Bannon writhed beneath the shade of the smithy's roof, hands to his face, screaming, and blood pouring around his fingers. In the dirt and horseshit of the lot lay a substantial crimson piece of gristle. It became clear even to the counting idiot, who gripped his own nose, that Tate O'Bannon had lost a mighty important hunk of his face to the horse's ferocity. Old O'Bannon, stout and gray as a beech tree, wept and held a flintlock, raising it ominously when he wiped his eyes on his sleeve.
All that stood between that horse and a gun barrel in the ear was Polly. Her exasperation brought a red gloss to her white skin. Her bonnet was gone, and her sand-colored hair clung to the back of her long neck. She bared her fine teeth. When the Percheron lifted its massive head, she rose, and he swept her lithe body in the air to snap it back to earth on limber legs, dust rising. Like a gingham kite, she lofted and plunged.
Roma vaulted the fence and approached them. The Percheron paused, eyes rolling. Taking a breath, Polly slid her gaze off the horse for just a moment. Then something Niangua had never seen from her came over her face. Discomposure. Surprise.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Some Kinds of Love by Steve Yates. Copyright © 2013 Steve Yates. Excerpted by permission of University of Massachusetts Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Starfall.................... 1
Pleasures of the Neighborhood.................... 20
Homecoming.................... 44
New Father.................... 66
Hunter, Seeker.................... 81
The Fencing Lady.................... 104
Forgery.................... 122
The Green Tomato Marquesa's Night of a Thousand and One Triumphs........... 136
Tuesdays at the Center for Excellence.................... 164
Report on Performance Art in One Province of the Empire, Especially in
Regard to Three Exhibitions Involving Swine.................... 186
Coin of the Realm.................... 209
Mila Joins the Game.................... 246
Acknowledgments.................... 257