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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
August 29, 2010
Previously unpublished fiction.
© 2010 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Man & Oak Tree, 2009
© 2009 by Bud Grossmann
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PICNIC ROCK REVISITED
Fjord, Wisc.
Thursday evening, Aug. 26, 2010
Dear Deborah Ann,
Yes, thank you, Debbie, for letting me know your Saturday plans. That schedule is fine with me (and Mom).
You poor baby! Sorry to hear of your gluttonous consumption of noodles. Sounds, though, like the meal was worth the pain.
It’s 9:31PM, and I’m about to wash the lunch and supper dishes, but I think I’ll first put down a few lines to you. Mom was cheerful and chatty this evening, so I had her call Aunt Bonnie. She informed A. Bonnie she (Mom) was calling from a plowed field near Madison and needed unspecified help. Now Mother is asleep in her recliner chair.
Earlier in the day, when Mom woke from a nap, she perceived a dog presenting a danger to certain nearby children. “Meatballs or something, do you have them?” she anxiously asked me. “Throw them at the dog and when he eats them, you catch him. You don’t think that’ll work? Grab him by the collar while he’s eating the meat!”
You asked if Mom and I got out of the house on this bright, breezy summer day. We did indeed. Dad’s leg is still bothering him, so, wishing to save him further strain, I took Mother to the farm to visit him after we picked up our mail. (One item only, a Century Tel bill with charges for two months plus a six-dollar late fee—I think when I replaced my lost credit card, I didn’t update my auto-pay. When I call to set them straight, I intend to say, “What the hell? Don’t you have my phone number?!”)
Interesting item on T. Gross Tuesday night, an explanation of why driving while talking on a cell phone is a particularly dangerous distraction but driving while conversing with a passenger can be demonstrably safer than driving alone. I’ll tell you more if you didn’t hear it. Tonight I listened a little to Jane Mayer, author of a TNY article on two billionaires who quietly fund right-wing causes.
Oh! I have more to tell you about my getting out. We got to the farm, and Mama conked out in the blue chair. Dad had a stack of mail to go through, and two newspapers, so I, in jeans and zori, took my nine millimeter out for a walk. Right away I saw a chipmunk on the stump under the oak and maple trees beside the white garage, and I squeezed off a shot from fifty feet. You’ll be pleased to hear me tell you my bullet scuffed across the stump face an inch to the right of where I meant to aim.
I hadn’t brought a holster. I carried the pistol in my hand as I quietly circled the barn, searching for woodchucks. You should see the digging they have done. I slipped the pistol under my belt in back of me when I took a leak in the weeds by the scrap iron pile east of the barn. Then I went up the driveway as far as Picnic Rock. I lay on Picnic Rock for a while, not long enough to fall asleep, but almost, with the pistol on my chest and (I realized later) my extra ammo clip in my hip pocket. Sustained a tender bruise, as it turns out, on the right cheek of my delicate derrière. You seldom see that happening to woodchuck hunters in the movies.
Lying upon the rock, I attempted to catalog my multitude of sensations and compare them with what I said some years ago in a poem about that same Wisconsin boulder. The main thing I was curious about was the “wind rasping through the corn.” Today it seemed more a whispery rustle, but rasp is a defensible verb. The rock, like many things, seems smaller in life than in memory. Have you and I together rested our backs upon it? Forgive me for not recalling. I think you recently snapped a picture of me as I posed with my Ruger beside that rock. Or maybe we were farther west along the driveway.
The air temperature this afternoon was very pleasant, the sky a deep blue beyond the silvery fluttering undersides of oak leaves straight up above me. Mosquitoes left me alone at Picnic Rock (they feasted ferociously in the locusts), but sounds of other insects accompanied the whispering of the corn.
I went to the end of the driveway and back, fired no more shots, did not bring out the pistol from my belt when a buck deer bounded out of a beaten or eaten patch of the corn field below Grandma Fischer’s beloved oak (long dead but still standing) in the triangle of woods at the curve in the road near the barn. The deer crossed the driveway fifteen yards from me, paused a little way into the locusts north of the barn, and stared at me a quarter minute or so. If I had not kept my eyes on him every second of his travel, he’d have been invisible where he stood; his coat perfectly matched the bark of trees beside him.
I was put in mind of an incident, circa 1964, when I watched Uncle Arthur take a quick rifle shot, in season, at sunset, at a big bounding blur, a whitetail deer proceeding directly away from us in heavy brush and snow on the public land west of the little-crick bridge. I disapproved of Uncle Art’s shooting—he almost certainly missed, and I judged he’d had no likelihood of making a clean kill. When I asked if he’d seen horns, he said, “He ran like a buck!” and I was skeptical of that claim. But in the years since that day I have come to believe that I myself can, in a Gladwellian Blink, at dusk and at a distance, distinguish the more muscular movement of a male from the daintier dance of a doe. Today I had a good look at the velveted antlers of the animal that crossed my path, but his heavy haunches and gorgeous grace made me see in my mind again the big deer who narrowly avoided a bullet in the butt.
So. That’s pretty much my story of getting out, dear Deborah Ann, and I should thank you for asking. I thought of you on this lovely August afternoon and actually wished you were with me, as you have been before on that exact same stretch of road.
Love,
Dave
12:09AM
I’ll close this now, and declare it fit to send. I did do the dishes. As I was wiping the kitchen counter, at 11:30, with the windows open over the sink, I’m sure I heard geese. Figuring the big moon should be high, I went outside in hopes of seeing who was honking in the sky. I saw only stars, the dented moon, black branches bobbing above Doc Jensen’s roof.
DCF
♦
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