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“I remember where I got that knife now. I hadn’t thought about it in years. It was a holler or two over across your line. Seems like kind of a cedar grove in there, where I reckon he’d been cuttin fencepost. The knife was layin on a sandbar down by a spring in the mouth of the holler. But it was like I said ten or twelve year ago and any smell of chewin tobacco would be long gone.”

“I don’t know why I did that.”

“Your pa lit out, didn’t he?”

“I don’t know what happened to him I never did believe he lit out and I don’t believe it now.”

“Well, folks is funny. I don’t care how close you think you know somebody, you don’t know what wheels is turnin in their head. Course you don’t remember but times was hard for folks back then. Times was tightern a banjo string. Lots of folks was on the road. He might’ve just throwed up his hands and said fuck it and lit out.”

“No.”

“Well. I ain’t tryin to tell you what to think about your own daddy. But seems to me me and you’s a lot alike.”

No, Winer thought, still looking at the knife lying open in his hand. I am not like you. I’ll never be like you. I’m not like Oliver either but both of you want to tell me what do. What to think. Both of you are always sayin, I’m not tryin to tell you, but you’re tellin me just the same. I am like myself. If I am like anybody then I am like him.

“My own daddy cut out on me in February of the year I was eight years old. This was in Cullman, Alabama. I never will forget it, not forget Christmas that year. They always told us Santy Clause and me and my sister used to go out and hunt for reindeer tracks. The ground was froze as hard as rock but we use to hunt anyway. Course they never was much, a apple, and a orange and a handful of penny candy. A few nuts. But this year they wadnt nothin in our socks. I wondered what the hell it was we’d done. I went out where Pa was standin in the yard. He was lookin off down the road though there wadnt nothin to see. Just what you see when you look down a road. After a while Pa noticed us and reached in his pocket and handed me a quarter. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Git yins some Santy Clause.’ That was when I was eight years old. Before I was nine he was long gone and we was livin with our aunt. She was sleepin with a sectionhand used to take a strop to us just to hear us yell.”

Winer didn’t say anything.

“Life is hard, Winer. You just got to get hard with it. It’s a blackjack game with life dealin and the dealer’s always got the edge. You see? You got to get your own edge. Because by God if you don’t there’ll always be somebody there lyin to you all your life and then handin you a greasy quarter and tellin you to buy some Santy Clause.”

“What’ll you take for this knife? You found it.”

“Hell, take it. You said it belonged to your pa.”

“Well, you’ve had it all these years. Decide what you want for it and hold it out of my pay.”

“Hell, no. If it means somethin to ye, take it on. Seems to me it’s a damn poor substitute for a pa but such as it is you’re welcome to it.”

2

Old woods here and deep. Here the earth was coppercolored with fallen needles and the air had the cool, astringent smell of cedar. An old wagonroad faded out somewhere in the grove then wound away toward home. The piled tops of dead cedars lay bleached and white and indestructible as bone.

He had not been in these woods since he was a child. Time seemed to have stopped here. He halfwaited for the rattle of trace chains, the ring of the axe, the slow turning of wagon wheels against the earth. This used to be an old houseplace, his father had said. The year the tornado came through the storm just picked it up off the foundation rocks and carried it away, no one knew where.

Here an old rusted stovepipe leached from the earth, there the remnants of a washtub, a few handmade bricks. On a level area of diminished brush the foundation stones themselves, profound, ageless, curious Stonehenge aligned to no known star.

The spring was clotted with leaves. Kneeling there he cleaned them out with his hands, watched the slow swirl of clean water into it, the list of sand and silt. An old one-eyed crayfish pretending invisibility eyed him apprehensively from the clearing water, retreated beneath a stone. A fall wind drove the first leaves from the tree above him, he arose in a drifting storm of them. He drank here, he thought, his eyes scanning the sandbar. Where had the knife been? His father had been fond of the knife, it wasn’t like him to lose it, once he had lost it and searched for it for two entire days before it was found and his father had not been one for repeating mistakes.

Winer dried his hands on the seat of his pants, walked on up the hollow. In its mouth he found wreckage he could not account for. Old rusted five-five gallon drums, purposeless shards of mauled metal. A cornucopia of gallon sorghum buckets. Broken glass jugs. He sat on a stump and stared at the refuse. A story resided here could he but decipher it. A jay scolded and then the woods were still and impenetrable again. He arose. He had never accepted before that his father was dead but he accepted it now.

Winer watched his mother at work, her eyes close to the sewing in her lap. Her lids were veined and near lashless, the skin drawn tight and smooth over her cheekbones. She seemed oblivious to him, to anything save the cloth her needle moved in. Her mouth was pursed slightly in the expression of resigned disapproval with which she viewed the world. She is old, he thought suddenly, though he knew she was not. For a moment something in the calm placidity of the face reminded him of the old men in Long’s store or Hardin’s, the serene face of an old woman looking down on him long ago from the high cab of a cordwood truck and from an Olympus of years, a face quilted and wrinkled by time until its seemed ageless, something found in nature, an old walnut hull found in the woods. Who was she? Aunt, grandmother, surrogate mother? Whoever’s she was, she was never mine.

I am your blood, he thought. Half of me is you and yet I know nothing about you. I fed at your breast and yet I draw more memory and knowledge from a lost pocketknife than all your years have showed me. Than all your reproach has taught me.

And you know. Somewhere behind the placid mask you wear for a face the answer lies. You may not know it but it is there. Somewhere in the vaults of your memory, old stacked and yellowing newsprint. There must have been things said I did not hear, did not understand if I did. Or have you known all these years, I’ve never known your motives or your reasoning. Did you cut his throat while he slept, did a tinker with his pots and pans trouble your dreams even then? Did his forerunner appear to you in a vision long ago, were you just clearing a path for his coming? Or did Pa just walk off down a road, the way you walked off down a road in your head?

“Did Pa ever fool any with whiskey?”

She looked up sharply. “Do what?”

“Did he ever make whiskey? Or sell it?”

“Lord, no. What makes you ask that?”

“I just got to wonderin.”

“Well, I’d like to know what got you to wonderin any such as that. Has that lowdown Hardin been feedin you a mess of lies?”

“No.”

“Your pa never even drank. I never even knowed him to make a drink of whiskey but one time and that was at a dance before we got married. Your pa was funny turned. He kept to hisself and he never had the patience to put up with a bunch of drunks the way you’d have to do to fool with whiskey.”

“You never talked much about him,” he said. “Why is that?”

“He said it all when he pulled that door to behind him,” she told him.