“Old man Stone … meanest bastard I ever … all his sons and daughters wilder … mean … and they was a lot of them.” The gears crashed and Banger wheeled the truck onto the main road.
“They had all these little shacks with broken-down rusty cars out front, piles of lumber and empty longnecks and pieces of machinery that might come in handy sometime, the weeds growin’ up all crazy through ’em everywhere. The Stone boys was all wild, jacked deer, trapped bear, dynamited trout pools, made snares, shot strange dogs wasn’t their own and knocked up every girl they could put it to. Yessir, they was some bunch.” He turned onto a dirt road that ended at the sugarhouse he’d fixed up.
“Should of looked at what I was doin’. Guess I brought you home with me, I’m so used to turnin’ up the hill. Fried bird for supper. You might as well stay.”
He took down four birds from the side of his woodshed and hung up those in his game vest. He wouldn’t let me help pluck the supper birds but waved me into the sugarhouse. Lady raced around him, chasing the down feathers in the rising late afternoon wind.
I looked around inside. There were a few books on a shelf, some pots and pans hanging from nails, the dog’s dish and a braided Discount Mart rug behind the stove. Banger’s cot, narrow as a plank, stood against the far wall. I thought of him lying in it, night after night, listening to the dog’s snuffling dreams behind the stove.
The place was something of a grouse museum with spread pat tails mounted on the walls—greys, a few cinnamon reds and one rare lemon-yellow albino. Curled snapshots of Banger as a young man with grouse in his hands were stapled up beside colored pages cut from hunting magazines, showing grouse on the wing. There were shotguns hanging from pegs and propped in the corners. A badly mounted grouse of great size, tilted a little to one side as though it were fainting, stood on a section of log behind the door, and nests of dried-up grouse eggs on a little shelf must have dated back to Banger’s boyhood collecting days, featherlight shells filled with dried scraps of embryonic grouse.
I lit the kerosene lamp on the table, illuminating a framed photograph in a wreath of plastic flowers, a picture of a girl standing in front of a farmhouse with a sagging roof. She had long hair, the ends blurred as though the wind were blowing it when the shutter snapped. She squinted into the sunlight, holding a clump of daisies hastily snatched up at the last minute for effect. I could see the clot of soil clinging to the roots. Banger’s dead wife.
Lard spattered out of the frying pan and flared, ticks of flame, as Banger dropped in the floury pieces of grouse. He sprinkled salt and pepper, then threw the fresh livers and giblets of the day’s bag to Lady behind the stove.
We ate in silence. Banger’s jaws worked busily on the savory birds. He said nothing for a change. The oil lamp flame crept higher. I thought of wagon axles set in granite ledge and asked what old Stone was like.
“He was the worst of the whole goddamn tribe. Had kids that was his grandkids. Dirty old tyrant, used to whip ’em all, keep ’em in fear.” His fingers drummed a partridge roll on the table. He shouted at the photograph of the girl, continuing an unfinished argument. “The old pig ought to have had nails pounded into his eyes and a blunt fence post hammered up his asshole!” Banger’s voice choked.
I did not see him for nearly a month after that dinner.
The dark fox trotted behind the screen of chokecherries along the highway, undisturbed by the swishing roar of vehicles twenty feet away. This was the extreme southern border of his range and he new crossed this road. The corpse of a less-wise raven lay beneath a bush like a patch of melted tar. The fox rolled in the carrion, grinding his shoulders into it. He got up, shook himself and continued his tour, a black feather in the fur of his shoulder like a dart placed by a picador.
As swiftly as though she were pulling grass Noreen plucked the second bird. The other lay on the white enamel drainboard, a dusky purple color.
“Oh, I don’t mind doin’ it. I done hundreds of ’em. There was one or two years when I was a kid, things were real bad up here, no jobs, no money. We lived on pats and fish – trout, suckers, anything. I used to clean the birds.” Her fingers leaped from the small body in her left hand to the pile of feathers in the sink and back again.
“My brother Raymon’ done the fish. He never liked the smell of a bird’s guts, but it don’t bother me. He can skin out or clean any other kind of animal just as fast and good, but not birds. I don’t mind ’em.”
There were five of six dull pocks as she yanked the difficult wing tip feathers. “Okay, there you are.” They lay side by side, dark cavities between their rigidly upthrust legs. Noreen leaned against the sink, dove-grey twilight washing up around her like rising water. Her russet hair was twisted into curls and there was a downy feather on her cheek. She sang a few words that sounded like “won’t lay down with Cowboy Joe.” The hell with Cowboy Joe, I thought, what about me?
It wasn’t the first time I’ve been in a bed that turned into a confessional afterwards.
“You married?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, me too. I knew you were.” The vixen face was pale in the thickening dusk.
“My brother,” she said. “My brother Raymon’, you know?”
“Yes.”
“He ain’t my full brother, see, he’s only my half brother.” Her voice was a child’s, telling secrets. “See, Ma had him before she met my dad, and Dad give him his name.” The bed was a fox’s den, rank fox smell, the smell of earth. She whispered. “I done it with Raymon’.”
“When?”
“Long ago, the first time, see? He’s only my half brother. That was the only time.” She looked at me. “Now you.”
“Now me what?”
“Now you got to tell something bad you done.”
It stopped being a game. Unbidden, to my mind came childhood crimes and adult cruelties. I was furious to feel prickling tears.
“Tell me about Raymond,” I said.
“See, she was goin’ with this guy, he come from a family that used to live around here—the Stones, they don’t live here now—and Raymon’ was on the way, but before they could get married there was some bad trouble so Raymon’ didn’t have a father. It was real love and she almost went crazy. But she met my father, he was cuttin’ wood over here, workin’ for St. Regis. He come from a town up in Quebec.”
“So Raymond is really a Stone?”
“Yeah. Well, he never used the name, but that’s his blood. That’s half his blood.”
I thought of Stone City, the broken shacks, the blue door with its peeling paint, the iron axles, the outlaw hideout.
“Which one of the Stones was he?”, thinking of what Banger said about the old man.
She got up and began to dress in the faded evening. She smoothed back her hair with both hands. “This is between you and I,” she whispered solemnly. “Floyd. He was the one that got the electric chair.”
It became a regular thing. Every Friday night was confession night. I heard who killed the kitten, who stole a coveted blouse from a girlfriend. She was absorbed in family relationships. Most of all I heard about young Raymie’s troubles with his old man, Raymon’ the Half-Stone, as I thought of him.
“Raymie got another beatin’ last night. See, he’s got to run that trapline every twenty-four hours, and he’s suppose to do it real early in the mornin’ before he goes down to the hardware. Well, he forgot and