‘Tis October

The hurricane/tropical storm took an eastward cank as it approached the eastern states and so most of the rain missed us. We had some on Friday evening, then overnight that night pretty hard, but yesterday it only sprinkled a time or two, and today is dry but blissfully cloudy. Friday night, Mrs. Orr was driving home and texted me, “Look at the rainbow.” I went outside and looked west, but saw only a golden sky, lit from behind the rain clouds. When I turned back to the house, there it was, a double rainbow in the northeast of our little world, and my heart sang within me as I stood and stared at it. My wife arrived home a few minutes later, and we stood together and watched it fade.

The hummingbirds are gone now. I put out fresh nectar on Tuesday morning, and the little beauties were busy all day, all female. I don’t think I saw any at all on Wednesday, and there have been no more here during the weekend. Godspeed, my sweet little friends. I hope to see you in the springtime.

We finally had to turn on the furnace, and also put the flannel sheets on the bed. Good sleeping weather. I left the window next to my side of the bed open the other night, and the wind from the approaching storm had the wind chimes a-dancing. Kept me awake part of the night, but I was too lazy to get up and close the window. I grumbled about it in the morning, but my sweet wife said, “But wasn’t it pretty music!” If you like windchimes, check out Corinthian Windchimes. They’re not cheap, but they’re the prettiest ones we’ve ever owned. We found ours at a green tree nursery years ago and were taken by the beautiful tones they produce, much mellower and more sonorous than typical clangy or tinkly chimes. Everyone we’ve ever recommended them to has told us later how much they enjoy the Corinthian music.

The deer and rabbits are plentiful right now. I scared a doe up in the woods behind the house last evening, and there are several of them bedding down up there every night. I watched a herd of seven or eight streaking across the ridge across the road two days ago. When we returned home yesterday after our weekly shopping excursion, a huge fat rabbit was sitting in front of the side door, taunting a frozen and frantic Bluebelle with his leisurely grazing. By the time we got out of the car, the little spotted coyotedawg was as wall-eyed crazy as a feed-store coon. Who says I can’t stir my similes?

***

My kind reader-friend Jeannie sent me a link a couple of months back. The link was to a literary magazine to which she figured I might want to submit something. I barely made the deadline the other day and sent a longish poem to them for consideration. They emailed me that they received my poem and will let me know if it’s been selected for publication in a couple of weeks. Been so long since I’ve submitted anything; I need to get back into that habit, since I have a backlog of poems and stories, some of which are even half-decent.

***

It occurred to me that I never heard my mother pray in all the years I knew her. As an adult, when I would visit her, I would say grace at mealtimes. Sometimes I would open one eye and peek at her, and Mother would always be looking around the room. This never bothered me until I took her to see her brother, my Uncle Gene, whom I despised. We all sat down to a fried catfish supper around his table, and Uncle Gene launched into one of those torturous long prayers of his. He was some form of charismatic….Pentecostal Holiness or Assemblies of God or some stripe of tongue-talker…and he would rail against all kinds of things in these prayers. Often he would forget to get around to actually thanking God for the food and asking Him to bless it, a failing common to windbag Christians. In the midst of this marathon intercession, in which he asked the Almighty to protect some friend’s son from them painted sluts in them beer joints, I opened my eyes to see what Mother might be looking around at. She had her head bowed, fingers laced together, eyes, squeezed as tight as the knot in a dry fly, nodding piously along to her brother’s heavenly monologue. Made me so mad, I almost lost my appetite. If the offering hadn’t been fried catfish, I just might have left the table. I never did mention this to Mother, because she would have saved that little anecdote up like money and would have tossed it in my teeth the next time I got on my high horse about something. “Well, I ain’t inclined to listen to someone who gits green-jealous of his own uncle’s prayin’ abilities…”

***

We had a cat named Butternut for 14 years. We were still in Texas at the time my wife presented me with this teacup-sized ball of hissing, biting yellow fur. She was problematic from the first, with a peevish disposition and the hardest bite-force of anything this side of a loggerhead turtle. We tried everything with Butternut, but she persisted in her meanness until the day when I came home from work and she jumped at me and fastened those little enameled needles in the flesh on the knob of my elbow. I lifted my arm and she hung there like Hemingway’s marlin, and I commenced to beating her ass with the flat of my hand. She let go of my elbow and I caught her and threw her onto the sofa and got my hands on a pillow before she could recover, and I whomped the shit out of her several times before she finally escaped. After that day, she was noticeably sweeter, and any time she got out of line, one good whack would adjust her attitude quite nicely. Near the end of her life, though, she began to be grumpy again, a condition not helped when her only buddy on this earth, our dog Bonnie, died and left Butternut out of sorts. One evening, Mrs. Orr, in that musical, wistful voice of hers, said, “Sometimes, I think about just rolling Butternut up in a towel and hitting her with a hammer until she stops moving.” I froze, as did Dixee and Purrl, our other cat at the time. We all looked at each other, and somewhere off in the distance, a hawk shrilled. For months after that, any time my wife would go to the linen closet to get a towel, the pets would scatter like hell’s hounds were on their heels. And people say animals don’t understand English. I once told a good friend of mine about what Mrs. Orr had said so calmly and so speculatively, and he said, “Sweet little Texas gal, huh? Sumbitch. Sumbitch man! I’d sleep light if I’s you, brother.” Wise counsel.

***

I went up to the fence on the far side of the woods that marks our property line. The corn our neighbor grew for sileage for his cows has been harvested and chopped and piled in the sileage pit down the road. I stood and watched the gorgeous clouds boil over the Clinch Mountains and thought about the guy whose fields I was gazing across. To say we don’t ride horses is an understatement. He’s the fine fellow who threatened Jinx last year because Jinx playfully chased — and never touched — some of his cows. His cows, mind you, that have done hundreds of dollars of damage to my wife’s plants over the years and for which this twit has never apologized, much less offered to reimburse me.  Anyway, he yelled at me that day that if I wanted to keep my dog alive, I’d better keep him home. I didn’t say a word in response, just called Jinx to me and we returned to the house. A little while later, I heard his truck in my driveway and went out to see what he wanted. We had some words, and I told him I’d make sure Jinx didn’t bother his cows, but I warned him about threatening my dog. I asked him if he wanted to threaten me. “I’m right here. You wanna shoot me?” I asked. He told me he didn’t have a problem with me, and went on about how hard he worked to keep his cows docile and that Jinx was riling them up when he showed up to have fun with them. As the conversation went on, I cautioned him about his tone with me, and reminded him that I wasn’t one of his kids. I knew that got him  a soft spot, because he’s well aware that I’ve heard him dog-cuss his own little boy in a manner I wouldn’t use with Nancy Pelosi, much less my own kin. He tightened up after that and I was watching him closely, because I figured my dig might have nudged him across the border into Fightland. He didn’t make a move, but for the remainder of our conversation, I was doing the math in my head. He’s a head taller than me and thirty years younger, lean from hard daily farm work, and here I am, old and out of shape, my reflexes and my eyesight mere patches of what they once were. And I realized at that point that if he were to throw hands at me, I might have to kill him. I know that sounds eye-rollingly melodramatic, but it’s really quite true. My days of fighting are over. I’ve had more fights in my life than I could ever count, and won my share of them. But fighting is usually little more than a violent ritual. Two men clash, one of them, through skill or strength or luck, gets the upper hand. They go their separate ways, and at least one of them is sore and miserable for a week, and then it heals, and the counter gets reset. But at my age, my options are (1) take a beating, or (2) shut down the other fellow’s central nervous system so he can’t give me a beating. I can’t fight anymore. I don’t have the strength, the speed, or the wind for it. But I’m experienced and wily enough to know how to really harm a human body, and the trouble with this sort of knowledge is that it can’t be easily channeled or harnessed, especially when adrenaline is the fuel behind it. I’ve had this conversation with men before, and I can always tell the ones who have been in a lot of fights from the ones who have merely fantasized about being Bruce Lee. Men who have experience in personal combat will nod and say, “Yep.” The ones with the untouched egos will explain what they’d do, or lecture you about the finer points of control and tactics. Uh-huh. All I know is that fighting is a young man’s game. I pray I don’t ever again find myself in that moment when I realize that the other guy is about to attack. It never ends well.

The field before me was strewn with stubble, stalks and silk. The clouds passed over it, and I savored the beauty in the October moment.  I felt better. The best part of me was long ago hauled off to the sileage pit. What remains is all I have for the time I have remaining here. No sense fighting about it.

~ S.K. Orr