March 1, 2008
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Crow Tale
The Crow Story
[working title of an unfinished project]
Audiobook of this story is done and has been
posted on http://www.runyonsway.netPosted 7/11/08
Manapefe, New Mexico is not on the map. It is a fly-speck town, really. It has the general store and a cafe/gas station, but not much else. It is farm country for the most part. The town within a town is Ellisville, but that's just a joke. Ellisville is a grain silo that has its own zip code. It stands on farmland outside of the main downtown area, but it's a part of Manapefe nonetheless. I was born here and I'll probably die here. Might even get my ashes spread about because there's no church in Manapefe or graveyard. We ship our dead out of the town over to Semapaw for a decent Christian burial. Those with the energy to make the round-trip drive can attend church there and a few folks do. Town itself has a population well under 100 souls. Like I said, it's farmland.
Most days I like to get up early and head over to the Manapefe Cafe and have some breakfast. Don't need much. My wife used to tell me I was getting fat, but she died a few years ago and ever since then it doesn't seem to matter much. I guess you aren't a married fellow, are you? Naw, you just look too damned happy. We could go there now and the coffee'd be fresh and hot. Might even set down to a bowl of cereal or pancakes, if you'd like. Your flat tire's all fixed and you don't have to rush anywheres so come on along and join me. You can park your car over at the Cafe and get yourself some gas. Oh, I mean from the gas pump, that is. Jurene is a bit waggish with her tongue but she's a pretty damn good short order cook. Been here all her life, too.
Did you say what kinda work you do? Oh, reporter? Well, not much news over here really, but like any small town there's just local gossip. By the way, my name's James but you can call me Jim or Jimmy, either one. You're a Jay? Ha. Well, I'm James. Can be interpolated about a dozen ways from sundown. How do you like people to call you? It's not your full name, but an initial? You say your name is Jesus? That's a pretty good name for these parts. The cafe is not far down the road, Jesus. Well, OK, if you say you prefer just "J", then J it is. You can coast the rest of the way if you're not in a hurry. Save some gas. You'll see the cafe as soon as you see the gas pump. Hah, and that's it on the right. See her? Just slide your car right in. No need to worry. You can park at the pump. Jurene hasn't had many customers since the highway wound through to Semapaw without clearing Manapefe some years back. The small town just got a bit smaller is all.
What kind of food you like for breakfast, J? Jurene'll serve you up just about most anything she has and she has some variety. You like a nice Sante Fe breakfast? Taos? Well, no matter. She can fix it, just about whatever you want... but don't be surprised if she asks you a lot of personal questions, J. In a small town people get nosey. You don't have to lock the car. It looks like there isn't much worth stealing and there's no thieves around these parts. Just follow me.*That was how they had met, these two strangers. The one, a somewhat straggly bearded fellow who looked like he could use a good meal or two and the other an elderly fellow who was like an old country dog. Just about everyone's friend... instantly. They walked into the Manapefe Cafe like they'd known each other for a lifetime, and now that I think about it... maybe they did. At least that is what Jurene had first thought when the two sat at her counter. She took their orders quick enough. It was the usual slow day at the Cafe and no other customers were waiting for their orders. Jurene eyed Jimmy Hall but didn't even have to ask what he'd want. Jimmy was always "two eggs, over easy with whole wheat toast, dry, no butter. A side of hash browns and a small OJ". The coffee was a given. Everyone has coffee in Manapefe. Tea? Downright un-American. Jurene had some old Lipton tea bags around somewheres, but they were staler than the Mayor's speeches. She kept them hid so's no one would even think to ask for tea. It was on the menu of course, but nobody asked for it.
The stranger named J? He had let Jimmy Hall order and then did the diplomatic thing by telling Jurene to just double the order. He'd reached into his pocket and pulled out a single $20 bill that looked newer than the morning sun. Jurene saw it and noted that she'd been wondering if the young man would be able to pay for the food, as clearly Jimmy was not going to have the resources to do so. As she thought this, the stranger had pulled out the bill and put it on the counter. A fleeting thought went through Jurene's mind. Did he know what I was wondering? She put that thought aside. She had four eggs and some hash browns to prepare. She was in the kitchen for several minutes and then brought the order out on two plates. The coffee came next along with the juice. Without so much as an invitation, she joined the two men with her own coffee. From behind the counter she went through a litany of questions, a bit more direct than Jimmy's had been. As he answered her, just for making conversation of course, he had the warmest smile. She felt as if her questions had amused him.
Well, why shouldn't they have amused him? Reporters are like ferrets, aren't they? They love to dig for details, so why shouldn't he have been entertained by the way Jurene went from one personal question to the next without so much as an "excuse me, but" in her method. That was when I came in and was promptly ignored. At least Jurene ignored me. Jimmy had nodded a hello and the stranger turned toward me slightly until Jurene brought him back with some more questions.
I sat just a stool or two over to the left of the stranger, but Jurene paid me no mind. It was with good reason. I'd been drinking, you see. I am an alcoholic. I drink, or at least I used to drink quite a bit. I've been sober now for about a year. Haven't touched a drop since that day. Might never drink again, but you never know. The desire to drink seems to have left me completely. I guess I am supposed to tell you what happened in the Cafe that day... and maybe just a bit more. It's a bit of a story, but at least now you know why Jurene wanted nothing to do with me. Last time I got drunk, I'd cussed her out and broke a few dishes. Paid for them the next day and apologized. Jurene'd forgiven me, especially since I paid her what was due to her... but I was far from her favorite customer.
The cup of black coffee that sailed in front of me was mine without asking for it. I just looked up from it, but Jurene had turned her back to me. I was less important to her than her trash. I thought about that as I sipped from the cup, trying to find in it enough sobriety to get through the day. Nights are pretty hard, but the daytime passes quick enough with a bit of hard labor. I am a farmer. I've been on my family farm since I was a kid. My dad was a farmer and his dad was a farmer, too. It's just about the way things went in those days. You got an education in the fields, not in the schools. There was no question about going to college, not in those days.
It was the stranger who turned away from Jimmy and Jurene. He sat right next to me and looked me in the eyes. He said "You're Michael Voss". It was not a question. It was a statement. "You're George Voss's son, and Jeremiah Voss's grandson." He said all this without so much as a "hello". I figured that he was some kind of tax man or sheriff, to be honest, but looking at his clothes I re-thought about it. It was all rather quick. It had to be a 'yes' or 'no' answer. He spoke as if he knew me. I was half sober enough to realize that. I took a long hard stare at this man and told him it depended upon what he wanted. My speech might not have been too clear, but he understood me.
Jurene and Jimmy just watched him and their mouths opened and shut like they were fish in a fish tank. J turned back to them and told them that he was en route to interview me when his car had that flat tire out on the roadway. "Interview me?", I thought. Why would anyone want to talk with the town drunk, a washed-up, no account, alcohol soaked and good for nothing fellow like me? He explained it very clearly. He wanted to write about John, my son, and suddenly the coffee didn't seem to fit what I needed. I reached around to my back pocket for the flask that carried my medicine, but the stranger touched my arm. "Could that wait a bit?", he asked. I smiled at him and told him that it probably couldn't. "Why you want to write about Johnny?", I asked. That stranger just looked straight at me. His answer baffled me. He told me that I knew why. At that point, I did not know why. I sure found out... but I'll get to that. I raised the flask to my lips and took a swig. Jurene came over and knocked the whole thing out of my hands. Told me she wouldn't allow any drinking in her place. She was right... as right as I was drunk... and I didn't want to sober up right then... not if I had to tell this man about my son.
Liquor has a wonderful way of changing the world and how you see it. It is a filter for those of us not strong enough to take what life dishes out. Self-pity becomes righteousness. Anger and frustrations are justification. A considerably poor self-image becomes blurred enough to make you think you're a heck of a fellow. Ask any drunk if this is true, but just ask him when he is sober.
"I want to know how John Voss lived his life", J said to me. "I think if we both consider that it might help to explain the reason why he died. My editor and I both think there is a story in that. The only one who knows John Voss really well is his father, and that is why I am here to interview you."
Jurene had saddled a bit closer and was listening in. When I looked up she was close enough to be breathing on me. I had to swallow my pride, a thing easy enough to do, and ask for another coffee. The spilled cup that Jurene had knocked out of my hands was still on the floor. She hadn't cleaned it up. There were tears in her eyes. I promised her that I wasn't going to add anything into the coffee, so she went off and brought another cup. She sat down near us to listen in and that's when Jimmy Hall ambled over, not wanting to be left out of hearing a good yarn.
"You want to know how my son lived and you think there is a story in that? Well, I'll give your readers a story all right. It might explain something about my son, true enough... but the story isn't about him. It isn't even about me so much. It is about old Jeremiah Voss himself, a man Johnny never met. Johnny's story begins with him."
J sat there looking at me and listening with his fullest attention. He had his hands folded across each other and leaning a bit on the table. I asked J if he was going to write anything down, seeing as how he was a reporter. J told me it wasn't his style. He said that he'd spent his lifetime listening to people and that he had the kind of memory that captured everything. If I had been in the schoolyard right then, I'd have asked him some dumbass question as a test. I'd have asked him to tell me the color of Jimmy Hall's shirt. I was thinking that and J looked at me without blinking and told me the color of Jimmy's shirt was blue. I was pretty sure I hadn't asked that question, but he'd answered it anyway. I sipped on my coffee thinking I really needed to sober up a bit more. J asked me to tell him about Jeremiah Voss, my grandfather. It was like saying that we should begin at the beginning... so I did. It was long ago and the memories are still clear.***"If you were to ask me what made Jeremiah Voss move from his homeland and settle in Menapafe, I couldn't tell you. His father and mother are folks I never met. They were long dead when I was born. Grandpa had been born some years before the turn of the century. My dad, George Voss, came along in 1905 and I was born 1938. By the time of the story Grandpa was quite an old fellow, but he wasn't about to retire. He was still up before dawn every damn day and that is what he taught my dad to do. My grandad taught that to me too, because my own dad had passed on when I was young. I took my dad's place by the time I was ten. Around a farm there are chores to do and you begin way early."
I was explaining this to J because he was a city fellow. I figured he did not know much about farm life. He just sat and listened to me, nodded his head, and I allowed as how he understood such things. I continued.
"Grandpa was growing corn back then. He had some tomato vines. He grew grapes. He was magical with zucchini, but the thing that made the best money was corn. Now he'd already learned that some crops have to be rotated or they leach the soil of its nutrition. The dust bowl years had been hard on farmers, but Jeremiah Voss was quick to learn. The year I'm talking about we had planted corn. After I was finished with milking the cows Grandpa expected me out in the fields. He might not have been harvesting the corn, but he checked it every day. He wanted to inspect how it was doing. Never missed a day, either.
"Now the first day in this story, I'd joined grandpa out in the corn fields. He was looking at the husks of corn in one place and inspecting some damage to those ears of corn. When he saw me he looked up at me and showed me the corn. It had been sort of torn apart and pulled about. It wasn't just one or two ears of corn, either. The stalks had looked broken, too. Grandpa told me that the damage was due to the crows that hung about the farm. 'Son,' he said to me, 'these here crows are like flies at a picnic. They scavenge for everything they get and make themselves a damn nuisance. Tomorrow you and me are going to bring our guns and have a little target practice. When we are done, old Mr. Crow is going to be looking for a better and safer place to have his breakfast.'***The next day Grandpa was up early and was ready for me when I got to the bottom of the stairs of our house. He'd made his breakfast right early. He preferred a good swig of whiskey to lubricate his senses. It wasn't enough to make him drunk, but it was enough to hold off the demon until later in the day. Yes, my grandfather was an alcoholic, too... but he would've denied it. I tossed some eggs together and a biscuit, along with a bit of milk. I was all of ten years old at the time. Grandpa was nearing his 60's. He'd lost his wife the year before. My dad passed on back in 1945 toward the end of the war. My mom had passed on from breast cancer. It was just the two of us. An old man trying to be father and grandfather to a kid. He'd have probably gone more deeply into the bottle if he hadn't taken on my care, but as I was growing older he'd been drinking a bit more.
I turned to Jurene at this point and said: "It wasn't pretty to see, so you can understand that I know how you feel, Jurene." Jurene stared back at me. She had not known about Jeremiah Voss, now dead and buried all these years... somewhere over in Semapaw. I turned my attention back to J and continued the story.
"Sonny," Grandpa said, "today we are going to bag us a few corn-stealing crows. We are going to set out in them fields and just wait for them to dare to fly by." We headed out and it was still dark. We took up a place in the fields and Grandpa told me to wait till we heard the sound of their call. Crows are noisy birds. Big voices. Attitude. I think they all are, even today. They love to strut in front of all the bird kingdom with their noisy cries. Maybe, just maybe, they are begging God to pay attention to them. It surely sounds that way if you've ever heard a crow complaining. Maybe it's about the heat, or a marital dispute or a scolding of papa crow to his kids, but they are loud enough to hear at a distance. This day it was silence.
We sat out in that field all day and all afternoon. Not a single crow had shown up. As grandpa was about to give in he'd heard a crow giving a loud call. It was not far from where grandpa had parked his car. When we got to it, we'd seen a crow flying off in the distance. His call sounded like laughter grandpa had said. On the windshield the crow had left his "calling card". It was a bright sized lump that had splattered right across the driver's side of the windshield. Grandpa looked at it and cussed. The bottle came out from his back pocket. He took a swig and wanted to call the bird all kinds of filthy names I am sure. He knew I'd be listening so he toned down the bad language.
"That old crow is a Satan if ever there was one. He knew it was my car. He knew I'd had a gun. He knew I'd be shooting at him and his kin today. That's why he warned them off. He just did this to let me know he knew. It is a challenge now. I'm going to peg that bird tomorrow for sure!". Grandpa let a bit of his liquor do the talking as he told his story down at the General Store.... to any and all who would listen. No one dared laugh about the bird dumping on grandpa's windshield, but a few sniggered over it when grandpa's back was turned. Lucky he never heard that laughter. It would have riled him even more than he already was.***It was with a renewed sense of purpose then that we began our journey the next morning. Grandpa was not about to let a crow get the best of him. No, siree. He fortified himself with something at the bottom of his bottle that morning, just to have the extra strength needed to combat the evils of this crow... and the world in general.
We went right back to the area where we'd staked out the day before. Grandpa went through the corn rows and sure enough there was fresh damage to his corn. Each ear destroyed just seemed to make him angrier. He was cursing that old crow from one end of creation to the other. There was a sound in the heavens, or so grandpa said, of generations of crows looking down upon him and he was going to show them all. A lifetime of crows had stolen the corn of Jeremiah Voss, but today... this day... the score would be settled! Grandpa was laughing to himself and building up his triumph in his mind, you see. The bottle did that to him this day. When the crow arrived he was like a gate-crasher at a party of one. He'd interrupted grandpa's celebration... in advance... over a world of crows. It was time to put them all in their place. Time for them to recognize that stealing corn from Jeremiah Voss had consequences.
I saw Old Satan for the first time that day. He was flying by, observing the scene below. He dived through the air quite majestically. Any crow with an ounce of wisdom should have steered clear of any kind of human being or even a scarecrow. That was the way they were supposed to behave. They were supposed to be cowardly in the face of humanity's superiority of intellect. Never heard of a crow killing a man, but plenty of crows get shot down each year. Right? Old Satan would have none of that. He was not your average crow. He went right into Jeremiah Voss' cornfield that morning and, right in the face of that old man himself, Old Satan began to attack the field to glean his breakfast.
I suppose the art of making rifles had improved considerably since the Civil War. No longer were the days when you had to shoot, re-load and then shoot again. Grandpa had a pretty old gun, but it was trusty enough to do its job. He could take a slow aim, fire, and bag any kind of creature he was aiming for. Ah, but that was when he was sober, you see. By the time he raised his rifle to peg Old Satan grandpa was more than a little affected by the mash he'd been drinking. You could see it in how his fingers gripped that gun. You could detect the trembling in his arms as if the weight of the old gun had suddenly doubled. The barrel of the gun wavered a bit as grandpa steadied himself to take aim. If it had only been three years earlier there wouldn't be a story to tell. Grandpa would've shot Old Satan and the other crows would have fled into the trees for safety.
He fired. He missed, and Old Satan simply ignored him. He fired a second time and missed again. Any other bird would not tempt fate this way, but Old Satan was playing a modified game of Russian Roulette. Each time grandpa fired, by staying right on that cornstalk, Old Satan was returning the challenge. Only a fool would think there was an empty gun after the fifth time the trigger had been pulled on a six-shooter. Was this damned bird born deaf? No, I don't think so. He was just plain ornery.
When Old Satan was tired of playing the game, he flew off. Grandpa was no better an aim at a flying target than he was a stationary one. Grandpa's shots took on an edge of desperation. He was firing shot after shot now, more rapidly seeking to hit the disappearing target.
Grandpa had to find somewhere to direct the blame for his failure to hit Old Satan, and I was the only one around. "Boy," he says to me, "where was your gun when I needed it? Did I drag you out here to watch or shoot? If you'd have gotten off your lazy, good for nothing ass and taken the time, that bird would have been history. You think he was laughing at me? Well, son, he was laughing at the TWO of us. Tomorrow, you are going to go out to this field and bag that bird. It is a matter of family honor now. You come home to me with that crow in your hands!" Matters did not improve much when grandpa got back to the car. On the windshield, not one, but two distinct piles of crow turd. Old Satan left his mark for me, too.-TO BE CONTINUED-
