The Remnants Read online

  2: Kennesaw

  Down a morning’s walk from True’s house where the town’s main road runs out of itself, two slip-sloped ruts take over on the way to a buckled-up foursquare where one more day is one more day is one more day too many.

  Kennesaw Belvedere is of the mind that what you put into a day isn’t always what you get out of it, and after a while, often after too long a lived while, you wish to hell you could just get out of it.

  This life.

  Even skin and bones like he is needs oats shoveled in on a regular basis to get the tide flowing, oats and greens and a nip of what-ails-ya. But when this true and tried method fails to move the boats out into the bay, a skin and bones man can be one stopped-up sumbitch, stopped up like he is today, like he was yesterday, like he’s been all week—a man on the can with a plugged canal, that’s Kennesaw.

  Kennesaw Buckett Belvedere.

  What he puts into his day isn’t always what he gets out.

  Ordinarily, the man is all bluer-than-blue eyes and cleft and chisel, and no matter what else looks good on him, those eyes alone carry the day. Those bluer-than-blues are what the skies copy for color, and when they take their time to blink, your heart stops until they come back open again. Kennesaw has made a lifetime of his blues. They’ve done his bidding; they get him tomatoes out of season, they get his overalls ironed, they get him firewood stacked cord upon cord. Jubilee Aspetuck once swallowed a pin when those eyes bored holes in her for hemming a leg too high. And Hunko Minton, he’d have no reason to ever wake again if those eyes were to shut for good. Those eyes, the bluest corn blue of them, when you see them, they move you, they move mountains, they make glaciers want to carve clean streams. Those bluer-than-blues ascended Kennesaw above the ordinary and floated him supernatural; all his life has been a levitation beyond mere mortality and the grounding odors of the everyday. But dammed shut by force of a clogged bowel push, shut like they are now on the man, the man on the can with his overalls down around his ankles who’s pushing and pushing and not getting a splash down below, not getting a thing for all his efforts, what the hell good are those bluer-than-blues in the dark recesses of an outhouse hole when you’re turning ninety-nine and everything’s still trapped inside?

  Every year on his birthday from the time his birthday was designated the last great date of the aught years, True Bliss has served Kennesaw Belvedere his birthday tea, just the two of them, just the one day a year. In his early forties it became clear that his blue eyes were getting bluer by the year while all other eyes on him turned as pale as spit as the years advanced. Heads were put together, wits were gathered, and those whose minds had yet to turn to applesauce mush were asked to think as one to determine an appropriate display of awe for this unusual man and his growing-bluer-by-the-year eyes. True Bliss, by her own consensus and the force of a rolling pin, let it be known that as the oldest in town it would be she who would fete this man, this unusual man and his bluer-by-the-year eyes, this man three hundred and sixty-four days younger than herself. True alone would make the occasion of his birth, the tenth of the month, a date of infamy, and on this unique occasion she and she alone would be the one to serve Kennesaw Belvedere his birthday tea. Loma Soyle and Twosie Lope were a pair of scissors to True’s unwritten decree about this last great date of the aught years, but True took a rock to their scissors and dismissed their complaints as merely pennies and pins, nothing but a drawer full of sheer nonsense, and with others too timid to offer any challenges of their own, True’s insistence on tea for only two become law etched in legend.

  True’s own birthday, in the shadow of his day one day hence on the eleventh of the month, was never designated a great date of the aughts or any decade. She has been prepared to celebrate her century on the day following this one by her lone and only, with a hot apple slump and a whistle and cup of bicarbonate. But Kennesaw’s birthday tea will come first.

  Thirty-six thousand one hundred and thirty-five days ago it was clear that Kennesaw Buckett Belvedere would stick out in town like a healthy thumb. As an infant newly disgorged into the world, he was a constant worry to his mother, Porcine, for neither his face nor body nor developing temperament reflected any familiar family traits, not one Belvedere-Minton-Bliss-Drell-Soyle-Hackensack-Whiskerhooven-Aspetuck-Swampscott-Saflutis-Engersol-Lope-O’ums-Buckett bit. With nary a recognizable protuberance or tic, not a horse laugh, not a limp, and most disturbingly, with only ten fingers and toes in perfect tact, Porcine feared that her only offspring with his bluer-than-blues and chiseled cleft and long strong limbs would be subject to ridicule, knuckle-pointing, and worse. Others in town were giving birth in the years that followed to children more un-comely, yet recognizable, and it pained Porcine so to see her Kennesaw growing more poised and proportional as the years slipped on. She’d see hooligans in town, the unfairly unremarkable younger boys with their flipper noses and their heads like butternut squashes, stop and gape at her Kennesaw as he passed their way like a June breeze through March, and they’d line up behind him and mimic his sure footsteps and follow him wherever he went with what she was certain was silent derision. Porcine’s only glimmer of hope was that the girls of town reacted much as she had in his early days, overcome by the disturbing sight of him and fainting until he and the torment of him passed.

  Kennesaw never seemed to notice his effect on others, shrugged off any reactions as just folk being folk, pointed his bluer-than-blues ahead of him and beyond and walked tall and oblivious to the thump-thump under his feet that was his mother’s heart. Porcine wept herself into eternal sleep from heartache—that’s what people told themselves. Her last thought was that boys such as Kennesaw were as wasteful as a gold strike in a town that prized coal.

  Kennesaw thinks of his mother as he sits on the privy. He recalls the frequency with which he rebuffed her advances on him with ax blades and pitchforks. He pushes with all his might to rid his body of the memory of dinners of boiled rocks and of pots of scalding water spilled his way, accidentally. He thinks thoughts as dark as the slop beneath him of her tears and her sudden tantrums, and the conversations she often had in rooms that were empty of others. He pushes and he pushes through his memories, yet nothing comes of his efforts but a sharp interior pain. He squeezes his guts and pushes harder and a new stitch of pain makes him think of his father now, too. Of how Flummox Belvedere called him Blue Eyes. The sound of it still echoes in the darkest parts of Kennesaw’s heart. The disapproval in the sound of blue. The dress down of it. You, Blue Eyes, his father would taunt as he unfastened his belt, that strip of an unjust god, get over here.

  Kennesaw peers between his thighs into the dark reflection below him, seeing his father’s loosening belt and his mother’s flying iron, and shaking his head with disbelief that such thoughts still swirl in him freely while other things in him take a prune enema to dislodge. Overalls around his ankles, slunk low on the can with his eyes scrunched shut as he groans through a push, the slightest malodor escapes his cemented pucker and ascends to sting him in one of those bluer-than-blues. What he’s put in to these ninety-nine years is stored up inside of him and push after gut-pained push he can’t get it out, none of it, never could.

  Kennesaw thinks: they say ninety-nine is as good as a hundred, better even, sounds like a bigger number, the pair of nines, two bent backs and stooped over heads resting on sagging chests, what an old couple; take two walking sticks and jab ’em right through those nine eyes and make ’em see a hundred stars before dark. You can keep your ninety-nine, keep your hundred, take back the last twenty even and leave me be with eighty at best, the last twenty have been one long indignity of branches dying on the tree of me, and rot at the root now trickling out of the birthday boy. Won’t this be a gift for True: if I’m lucky, I won’t live another year and she’ll get to be one hundred forever, all by herself.

  Kennesaw hates thinking: ninety-nine. Can’t even get this last week out of him and into the can. Worse still, there’s an alarming little sting dow
n there that closing his eyes tight in pain does not remedy. It could be from anything. It could be from the push. It could be a nettle he swallowed. It could be the memory of his father, lodged in his gut for eternity.

  Kennesaw doesn’t know what to think: ninety-nine. He came into this world with seventy-eight functioning organs and at least a dozen of them no longer work properly, yet he’s here, he’s still here. He may not have been born with any outward signs of family resemblance, but his innards call each other cousin. So what if he has the Hackensack-or-Is-It-Whiskerhooven gallbladder with its annual stone toss, or the Buckett heart that couldn’t keep a steady beat if you stretched it on a drum. He’s still here. True’s still here. Hunko Minton is still here. Hunko was always still here. Carnival Aspetuck—is he still here? Or Frainey Swampscott? Either Soyle sister? Whoever is left, we’re here. We’re all that’s left and we’re all that’s here. A spread of ninety to one day shy of one hundred, so many years, too many years, and in not too many more our numbers will be up.

  And now this: a stopped-up old man on the can with his overalls down around his ankles and his will to live lower than that. It’s his birthday. He’s ninety-nine. Perhaps True’s tea will slippery his slopes. If he pulls up his overalls and cinches his belt, his father’s belt, that strip of an unjust god, and runs a brush through the pewter on his head and pinches his cleft and chisel for spirit and blinks his bluer-than-blues to put the sparkle back in them, he’ll be ready for the trek to True’s for his birthday tea; that loosening tea; he’d drink the paint flakes off her parlor ceiling if they’d get what’s inside of him out for good.

  He thinks sometimes what you put into a life you’ll never get out. He flats a palm on the privy door and steps out into the morning light, blinks his bluer-than-blues, breathes in his ninety-nine, wipes his hands of what just happened. His birthday is the last great date of the aughts and he’s due at True’s to celebrate the occasions of his life. It’ll take him some time to get there, and hopefully, not too long to get home.

  3: Hunko

  Hunko Minton rose with the day like it was the last of Creation. The day and what was to come came in fresh as a hen’s egg with a slight breeze from the south and no more precipitation in the air than a hummingbird’s pee. The sun did what the sun usually does on an Indian summer Thursday: took its sweet time to rise by 6:17, yawned and scratched itself until 7:05, and by 8:23 deigned to fling its arms wide and stick out its big yellow tongue and claim the day officially on. At one minute past nine if you were that blue sky and you wanted to hurry up and idle, you had no need for a shave or a bath, and no need to brush your pearly whites clean of stardust, your skin was corn silk and your breath sweet chrysanthe-mum.

  Hunko excreted an altogether different aroma. Waking and stretching and scratching and poking out more than a yellow tongue, Hunko arose with a prehistoric agenda. He and the funk of him bypassed the kitchen pump and its cool runnings in favor of a quick head dunk into the last of last week’s rainwater left murky in the barrel out back of his kitchen door. You’d think he’d be whapping the bejitters out of all the mosquitoes flocking above the green-hued pool, but leathered skin like his is a callused shell impervious to sticks and pricks, and if they bit him he’d let them, today was not about flies.

  Hunko grabbed his hose; his bladder needed bleeding. He bowlegged it to the privy beside the well, but mistook the left-leaning pump house for the left-leaning outhouse, and disabused himself of enough flood to drown a turkey—disabused it right into the only semi-clean water on his land. He slid a wet finger across his mossy teeth then ran his tongue to follow, and the pee-yew of it was all the reminder he needed that today would be as different a bird as any that had ever flown.

  A million years ago today it was the day for grounding pterodactyls, or so Hunko decided, and he woke this morning in full bore meteor to reenact the anniversary. On every tenth of September since the molten lava cooled, True Bliss served tea and saltines to Kennesaw Belvedere in the parlor of her home on the occasion of his birth, and this was the day, and that was the deed, and he, Hunko Minton, was going to be the blast that would finally end that repast.

  Looking back, there had been, from Hunko’s perspective, between himself and Kennesaw, a vision of the future in which the two of them viewed the horizon through a conjoined set of eyes—a future as only a cyclops could see it—without worry, without censure and, without question, without others. That this did not come to pass—yet—was something Hunko in his youth did not see coming, nor could he endure the ongoing sight of it in his young manhood, but unlike the fabled Cyclops whose powers were lost in a single blinding blow, Hunko has never lost his focus on the horizon and the dream he knows will one day rise there before his eyes, and that day is this one.

  All through the long stretch of his young adult years through his middle years he endured Kennesaw’s inexplicable daily disappearances from not only his life but also from town itself during daylight. As years grew mossy, and Kennesaw was once again inexplicably present in town, as if he’d never been absent for more than an afternoon, though not necessarily present in Hunko’s daily life, what set Hunko atavistic was what he sensed to be the growing bill and coo between Kennesaw and True Bliss. At picnics, at cart-arounds, Kennesaw couldn’t so much as pinch a crease in his overalls without True’s eyes ironing him. One Sunday not so many years ago (in truth, it could have been more than fifty), he witnessed them passing one another in front of the windows at New Eden Grangery and caught True espying Kennesaw’s sidelong glances at his own reflected self in the only piece of plate glass not broken, and seeing that, Hunko hurt like his own face had broken the rest, and the hurt he felt from that, like the broken glass, has never mended. True Bliss and her wandering cataracts had no business doing such wanton admiring, and although there was no proof that Kennesaw was the least bit aware of her awareness, Hunko decided he had to keep an eye on them both.

  Morning and its sleepy smell waddled fat and lazy through ten o’clock, then eleven o’clock, and needing a rest after such inert exertion, straddled its ass on noon like a buzzard on a fence rail. By one o’clock the southern breeze was starting to heckle a bit, and by 1:40 it was a full-blown bossy gale. Hunko was undeterred by the air and its growing discontent. In full snit, he was a disruption of molecules as he stampeded through the overgrown clearing where four generations of Drells were felled; his anger falling all over itself on the ridge where all the girls used to tumble in the high grasses that aren’t grasses anymore; and he was coming undone by the time he stomped along the shores of Grunts Pond where the males of every generation first took themselves in hand and learned what they were capable of, and where Hunko’s youth-ignited Kennesaw obsession first issued from the depths of him. Today’s outrage would quell it once and for all and put a life-lasting longing to bed. He was sure of it.

  By the time he reached the lumpy west slope of the valley beyond Grunts Pond, Hunko had become a geological disturbance: naming rocks True and kicking them. By two o’clock as the air picked up speed Hunko’s pace did, too, kicking more rocks he named True, even kicking one he named Kennesaw but that was accidental, and the next True rock he kicked he blamed for it. By 2:13 his toes swole numb from so much kicking, by 2:28 as he bushwhacked his way through the tangles that devoured the pass from the old Drell barn to the old Buckett barn, which was between the old old Drell barn and the old old Buckett barn, and by the time he rounded the woodshed that was all that was left of the newest of the oldest Aspetuck barns, his anger was no longer something he could molt off like feathers, he was as drenched with it as he was with perspiration and neither smelled pretty.

  Blind fury doesn’t see what it needs to see, while the wind can stare holes anywhere it wants. Hunko squashed sucker pumpkins on his trespass through Carnival Aspetuck’s long-ago garden, right in front of where Carnival would be sitting if Carnival was still among the standing; but standing or sitting it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. If Carnival had been standing t
here in the mist, he might have wobbled his old ax handle at Hunko in protest; towards his end, that was the best Carnival’s once legendary grip would allow. He’d press a given-up fist to his gone-bad hip and lead with his good as he’d duck under the clothesline where his sister Jubilee’s ample up-busters once hung to dry and he’d try to shoo Hunko from his gourds, but standing, sitting, shaking, even living—none of it would do no good. Hunko was all anger and stomp, well out of the garden and off on a diminishing trail of butternut by the time Carnival might have reached the carnage, had Carnival still been earthbound and erect. Best his ghost could hope for was a gust of wind to catch his sister’s padded encasement and jumble it airborne like a swollen cloud till it found a landing spot abreast his own ectoplasmic face and brought him back to their life.

  4. Jubilee

  Odd how going through life as one of two should leave Jubilee Aspetuck feeling so alone, all the more so at the end.

  Jubilee was a product of a harvest moon and two cousins in the shadows gone goofy. It was the kind of clandestine whoop-de-do that related townsfolk were adept at, and Jubilee’s parents were definitely related and most decidedly adept. No one saw the union coming. Russet Aspetuck with his alluring cowlick and long thumbs had long been intended for Agapanthus Saflutis, and barring an intercession by Butte O’ums or Columbine Buckett, an Aspetuck-Saflutis union in the spring of whenever promised to be by all accounts a union free of the usual genetic flimflammery.

  Russet Aspetuck, instructed by his father to bank in his heart a fire that would last a lifetime, chopped one hundred cords of maple and hickory and ash and oak, he stacked them high and spread them wide, and when he was done he confessed to his mother that he would rather see them burn to cinders than have to live long enough to heat the house of a bride he didn’t want to wed. This was news no town crier had ear of, and the suddenness of it led his usually composed mother to take an ice pick to the locked spice box for a nip of vanilla bean and a swig of applejack.