Old Man fed himself on shanks of stale bread and cheese for a week. He drank water from his well, though he knew Owl would have disapproved.
"That well is not so deep as could be," she often reproached him.
Owl was gone now.
Old Man sat on his porch as the snows receded. In the morning the air was still too chill for him. In the evening the porch got cold as soon as the sun got low in the West. Old Man braved the evening air, mostly because that was the time the animals stirred in his yard.
He liked to watch Mother Skunk lead her two winter kittens through the yard. They lived in a brush pile just the other side of his fence. In the evenings they often made their way out of the brush pile, under his fence and through his yard.
"Hey, Skunk," he often called to her. She never replied.
Mother Skunk led the way for her family. She kept her tail straight and high in the air. People often forgot skunks always raised their tails to spray, so they could twirl the tail and throw the musky smell all around them. With this action they created a perfect circle-shield, smarting the eyes of their predators and gagging them. The predators would forget about food when the heavy, glandular stink hit them. Usually, a little spray was enough, so the adult skunks seldom had to unleash their whole load in one spray.
The kittens did not know how much to use. They often oversprayed and made a real nuisance of themselves.
"Hey, Little Skunks," Old Man would say aloud.
He was careful not to speak too loudly to the kittens. They delighted him with their hopping. Mother Skunk skimmed across the grass yard, aloof in her dignity.
The kittens hopped along after her. Their feet did not seem to touch the ground before they took to the air again, skipping across the grass, poking their noses into anything they noticed.
"You're really old," he thought one of the kittens told him one night.
He could not be sure. He had lost track of the kittens as they hopped around his yard. He did not see the kitten approaching his chair or see Mother Skunk veer toward him protectively. He stopped his rocking only when he thought he heard the kitten speak to him.
"What did you say, little one? What did you say?" Old Man felt his voice jump two octaves and ten decibels. No animal had spoken aloud to him for so long.
The wind gave him his only answer. The kitten jumped back across the lawn to his mother. She scolded him with a kind of clicking noise skunks used to chide their young. They disappeared shortly, all three of them, to the other side of his yard, away from the brush pile, through the growing gloom. Mother Skunk was taking her kittens out for the night's hunt.
Old Man rocked again, mindless of the growing chill, remembering the day he learned about skunk kittens back during his childhood in the Common Era.
Old Man lived with his grandmother most of his childhood. He and his younger brother stayed with her until she died one night after watching "I Love Lucy." She was ninety-six. She went to sleep in her big canopy bed at nine in the evening. She never woke.
"She went to sleep in this world," the skinny preacher said at her funeral. "And woke up in Heaven."
Old Man repeated the fine sounding phrase to himself on the front pew of the church. He said it to himself a thousand times over the years, any time he wanted to believe.
Old Man lived with Grannie from the time he was six years old. His brother came to Grannie after Old Man, because he missed Old Man so much.
Old Man came to live with Grannie on a late summer school day he could only dimly recall. If he had known how much his life would change that day he might have paid more attention. He was a little boy, though, and did not often pay much attention to anything other than the game he was playing. If he thought about anything else it was about what he would eat next or how much his little brother pestered him.
Old Man's young mother walked him to school one day, when he was barely six years old. He had no shoes but it was late summer in Texas, so he did not need anything on his feet. There were no imported fire ants in Texas in those days. Meadows had not yet given way to malls. Asphalt was coming but there were more dirt roads then.
Most of his friends went bare foot until hog-killing weather hit in November. The great Blue Northers used to come roaring down across the Plains states. He had never been to any of them but he thought they had plain names, flat sounding names like Kansas and Nebraska.
The Blue Northers were giant Arctic air masses let through to North Texas when a barbed wire fence lost a strand up in the Panhandle. The late summer weather became vicious in an hour. The air stayed cold enough you could butcher a hog and hang it in the smoke house where the great beast cured for three months.
"You be good, Little Man," Mama told him.
She often seemed concerned about his behavior. That is, she often seemed to worry about his behavior when she paid any attention to him at all.
"You be good. Stay close to home," Mama would say. She ran long, thin fingers around his oval face, down his neck and then tickled him under his chin when she told him to be good.
He listened for the second phrase in her reproaches so he would know what Mama thought it meant to be good.
He always nodded to her without looking. He did not want to see the fear in her eyes.
Something more than his civility seemed to be on Mama's mind that day. She did not ever walk him to school. She did not talk to him much since Dad had died in the plane crash. She did not seem to talk to anyone much anymore. She never talked about Dad.
She liked to put on a long, white cotton dress Dad had got her just before he died. She added a thick red belt with a silver buckle around her thin waist and put on red heels. She put a bow in her auburn hair and smiled crookedly at herself in the mirror.
She would go alone on Fridays, sometimes, and Saturdays, always, to the bars in South-Worth, places with names like "Rustler's Roost" or "Wagon Wheel." She drank and danced with men she would not see again after that night. They gave her nickels for the jukebox and let her play whatever she wanted.
She always told them her name was Violet, though it was not Violet, or any other flower name. She never played sad songs, not ever, even though she knew the men wanted her to pick slow songs and dance close to them.
"Play 'Cheatin' Heart,' one man would say.
"Play it yourself," Mom would tell him and flip his nickel back at him. She smiled when she told them off but she did not mean the smile and they could tell.
She played Western Swing songs and smiled when the fiddler cut in to saw his bow. She danced wildly then in ways the baptist preacher in the little clapboard church said was sinful when she went to church on Sunday. She agreed with him.
"Yessir, I am a sinner," she said to herself.
"But I ain't a bigger sinner than the non-dancers in here," she thought, looking around at the tidy congregation in their straight-back pews.
The men all wore white shirts and thin, black ties and black wool pants. Their socks were white and they wore tie-down black wing-tip shoes. They carried thick. leather covered Bibles, well thumbed, with black leather covers. If they wore glasses the frames where horn-rimmed and black.
The women were allowed a little color in their clothes but no make-up or lipstick. Eye shadow was for the kind of wome who went to dance to Western Swing on Saturday night, the kind of women who stayed late, at least until the bartender yelled, "Last call for alchohol."
The bartender always smiled when he pronounced his benediction. Everyone in the whole room laughed with him, no matter how many times they heard him say it.
He was a good man, Fred, the bartender. He served beer and whiskey around South-Worth for thirtyy years until the night a pair of robbers set on him when he was closing up his bar. They had hid in the Women's rest room until every one left. They were small men but tough, they thought, not at all drunk that night. They needed some money to get to El Paso, where they intended to walk across the international bridge into Ciudad Juarez.
They did not know anyone in Juarez. They did not speak Spanish, or even the Tex-Mex spoken around East Texas in those days. They just knew it was not working out for them in South-Worth. If they could get across the desert of West Texas to El Paso they could walk over into Juarez. They would be important men in Juarez.
Or, so their thinking went. They were not necessarily good planners.
"Give us all the money," one of them told Fred as he stood behind his bar.
Fred blinked. He had been robbed before but this was the first time in awhile. He was not used to it any more.
"Give us your money," the robber repeated, when Fred did not move.
"Give us your money, Fat Man," the second robber yelled at Fred.
He should not have said this because Fred was sensitive about his weight. He would have lost weight many times if Mona, his wife, had not been such a good cook. Mona kept him chock full of animal fat.
"I just love to see him eat," Mona often said.
In truth, Mona was a plain woman who had never been popular with the boys. Fred was her last chance for a man. If she did not feed him to excess he might notice the way they looked in a store window one day. He might decide he could do better.
So, Mona fed him and fed him.
"Give us the money, Fat Man," the robber repeated.
Fred swung a giant arm at the boy. He made contact on the first punch, striking the ninety pound boy just under his nose and above his tooth line. Two front teeth went straight down the boy's gullet, causing him to choke. Blood flew all over the boy's shirt. He fell into his friend, who caught him and started running, all at the same time.
They left without money and missing two teeth. They never got to Juarez, either, and eventually drifted apart.
"It just ain't worth it any more,"Fred told Mona that night after he made the late deposit. Mona agreed. Fred quit bar that night and went to work selling pre-need funeral policies, door to door, in South Worth.
"Last call for alcohol," Fred would yell just before closing time. Everyone would laugh, no matter how many times they had heard him yell the same rhyme.
Then again, most of them were pretty drunk by that time on a Saturday night, in a drafty barroom on a floor sawdust over cement in a bad part of South-Worth.
Mama walked him to school. He always remembered it as a Thursday, though his mind often played tricks on him when he thought of Mama. He knew for sure he was barefoot and in denim jeans. He recalled a white, high necked T-Shirt and no belt but that was what he wore in all the old pictures of him from that day. His hair was close cropped then, like all the boys, because that was how it was done in those days. To have hair long enough to comb was to invite the kind of catcalls that required a boy to answer with clenched fists.
"You be a good boy," Mama told him.
"I will, Mama," he said. He fidgeted under her hand as she cleaned his face for the third time in their short walk to the school house.
"Be a good boy. Do whatever your Granny tells you," she told him again. If he had looked up just then he would have seen her eyes go teary and her mouth quiver.
He did not look up to see her. He hugged her legs as high as he could reach, for he was a short boy who would grow up to be a short man.
Mama was a tall woman, taller than Dad had been, so people thought they made an odd couple when they walked down the sidewalk together. She never minded. She could look down at the thick, wavy, black hair on her husband's head and think of all the ways she got to see him because she was taller than he.
"You be good all day and be good from Grannie tonite," she whispered and swatted him on the seat of his jeans as he ran away from her to his friends in the schoolyard.
He did not see her again for twelve years, until the night of his high school graduation. By then she was dying of too many nights in smoke-filled barrooms and too few Sundays in church. He did not much remember her, then, but he knew he was someone he should remember, and love.
She was not there the day the skunk sprayed him.
