It took 20 minutes for Harry Jenson to die.
While the people of the town of Turner, Wis., went about their rituals of late morning–the sweeping and spraying after the day’s first milking, that second mug of coffee, naps and newspapers for some of the old timers, hand-washing dishes speckled with dried egg and jam–Harry lay among the wet and rotting leaves and didn’t take the trouble to even moan.
Something was broken inside of him. When he tried to sit up, pelvic bones shifted and there was a moist popping sound, so he rested, motionless, waiting.
At first he felt cold, listening to the wind whisper between the trees, watching the clouds move. He tried to distract himself and thought about the Packers–but couldn’t remember a single player. White hair and gray eyes and white skin and swollen spaghetti veins. Then a hot ache spread from his middle and leaked all the way to his fingertips.
Old man, old bones, he thought, stupid old man.
The ladder had slipped. He’d leaned too far. The bark was damp. The ladder slipped. He fell and broke. Old men break easy, old man, stupid.
Twenty minutes can be a long time.
He could feel his stomach and legs swelling with blood, tight against his jeans. He wondered how long it would be, a day, maybe two, before they found him. Old, stupid: words and images in his head: wish I wasn’t broke and forgotten in the woods like an old toy.
His pelvis had shattered and the bone splinters poked at his inside parts. They poked so hard and sharp that an artery snipped in half. His skin stretched against the pressure of blood trying to find a way out. His scrotum swelled to the size of an infant’s skull.
He noticed the weight of flannel against his chest, the smell of leaves. He rolled his head about, eyeballs wild, as if trying to find someone to blame.
The ladder had slipped.
All the blood in his middle place. Left leg, it feels gone, but above that’s tender hot, awful tender. Quiet. It’s quiet.
The hotness turned to numbness, and it was a quick and refreshing thing, like flipping his face to the cool side of a pillow.
He remembered he had an older brother named Orland. That’s not fair, he’s supposed to die first–Harry had always imagined it that way, they’d even spoken of it once while fishing. But things just weren’t working out.
When the world faded, he was watching the branches move. Leaves slipped away, tumbled down, shades of gold and lipstick red, pirouetting in the breeze, their motion in tune to the passage of time–quick and slow, together, pausing against the breath of an updraft, then falling, turning in color and space. He tried to snatch one, and against the sky his hand was pale and crooked as a winter tree.
Twenty minutes and this was the way he died. When the blood cooled, his eyes kept staring into the clouds, gray, which crept along at a soft pace, like dreams, and it was awful quiet.
The next day his body was found tucked under an afghan of leaves, eyes open and staring and cracked from the freeze the night before.
Orland Jenson, brother of Harry (who by this time was two days dead and one day found and bloated with formaldehyde), held the binoculars an inch from his eyeballs–not too close, since the skin was tender and purple. Across the garden, beyond the barbed wire, a heifer was fresh and he wanted to see the birth.
His arms were tired. He’d watch for a minute, then rest, then watch. It was hard to focus since his hand kept shaking. He sometimes had trouble drinking coffee: It would dribble and burn his fingers and lips. He could hardly eat anything from a spoon either.
The palsy nested in his right wrist. Last Sunday, he had dropped the offering plate in church. “God dang,” he yelled when the quarters and bills spilled beneath the pews–Handel’s “Water Music” stuttered as the organist paused and the congregation stared.
Grass’s long, he noticed. Looks sloppy.
A peacock strutted by the window, head bobbing. Orland and his wife, Gertie, owned three, all white as teeth, birthday gifts–purchased by Orland out of a love that was now habitual. “Love you,” they would say each night before dreaming, but it was a tired phrase devoid of feeling, as normal and easy as “Sure,” or, “So long.” So, though they had married out of affection some 57 years ago, and though they said “love” once a day and sometimes more, Gertie wasn’t interested in the peacocks, and neither was Orland, particularly.
It had been a week and he still wore bruises, still couldn’t walk more than a few steps without something to brace himself against. His hip hadn’t been right for years–now this. He’d spent the last six days sitting.
When he tried to walk, Gertie would sometimes cry or sometimes even make fun, she was moody like that, making fun and saying he looked kind of like a monkey–that stooped back and loping steps. Hey there, monkey man. He chuckled the first time.
On the riding mower, Orland had forgotten to duck. And now he turned his binoculars from the cow and peered at the tree that did it. That low-slung branch that stretched over the lawn, the only one he could reach to hang and fill a birdfeeder.
Had to stay. Mother likes the birds. Couldn’t saw it off. Should’ve ducked. I always duck. The sun put me into daydreams, I suppose. Should’ve ducked.
Orland, a man who worked seven days a week–always–though Gertie didn’t approve of Sundays because of the Bible, because of his age. And he has always worked, so now he’s restless with this gimp hip and bruised body.
Plus, his brother’s dead.
Orland’s face: creased and pale like a bunched-up tissue. He’s used to death, but not dead little brothers–but he’s not exactly sure how he misses Harry.
Gertie, a woman with dandelion fluff hair, now in the kitchen and molding the crusts of apple pies. Orland listened to her hum–something they used to dance to.
The branch had hit him across the bridge of his nose, flipping him off the mower. He had lain in the grass while Gertie hurried from her rocking chair on the porch. The riding mower kept going, eventually tumbling into the cattailed ditch near the road. “Pa,” she said, “don’t die. Don’t die, please.” And through the blood that spiderwebbed his face, Orland managed, “Settle down, Mother.”
That evening he had joked he wore a bandit mask–the skin around his eyeballs the shade of plums–“Stick ’em up,” he said to the mirror she held in front of him, pointing with a trembling imaginary gun of a finger.
“Poor Pa,” said Gertie, again and again, every day since, just like “love” before sleep.
That evening she had taken a Polaroid.
“Wait,” he said, removing his reading glasses. “OK. Now.”
Now Orland watched the cow as it turned around in a circle, lowed once, then ate some grass. Least I didn’t fall off a ladder like an irresponsible idiot, he thought. Least I didn’t go and get dead on everyone. He tried to shrug, but his shoulders hardly moved. He rested the binoculars and smoothed his pants and closed his eyes. Then he coughed. Something miserable rose up from inside, and he bent over in his chair and made a mewling sound that he tried to silence with his hand.
He strangled it back down inside. The feeling passed. He sat up straight. “Damn it, Harry,” he said. “Damn. Damn,” making fists.
He raised the binoculars again. The heifer chewed grass, seemingly unconcerned as a calf sprouted from her backside. Blood and embryonic fluid leaked down her hindquarters. The calf’s legs pawed at the air.
From the profile, looks two-headed, a Siamese cow, Orland thought and almost said.
The broken placenta hung around its neck like a muddy shawl. Then the calf slipped out and fell onto the grass, a wet and bony heap. A shower of blood and excrement followed.
“Mother?” He yelled, weak, and the word fluttered halfway down the hall to die.
A minute later and he yelled again, “Mother.”
He heard: “Yes?”
“She done birthed another one. No problem.”
“What?” Wooden spoon put down on the counter, pans moving.
“Come here.” He spied on the heifer licking its calf, which tried to make sense of its muscles, struggling in the grass like a tangled marionette.
Heavy footsteps on the linoleum, then whispering on the carpet, and she walked into the room, wiping her hands on her apron. “What, Orland? What, what?”
He handed her the binoculars. “Look, that’s what.”
She did. Then she passed them back. “Another cow. How many hundreds of cows . . . ” She shook her head. “I’m busy. Got to hurry and have it all ready for Harry’s wake, for heaven’s sake.”
“Should we call Joe?”
“Why? About what?”
“Well,” he motioned with his hand, “about the cow.”
“More important things on all our minds besides cows.” She turned to go.
Orland said, “I reckon he’d want to know it turned out fine.”
Over her shoulder she said: “Joe and Helen will be here in three hours. You can tell him then.”
She left Orland frowning in his chair, watching the veins on the back of her legs. He listened to the wail of the white peacocks, that wavering cry he’d always likened to the sound of dying children.
They sat like this: Joe, Helen, Orland and Gertie, Gertie wearing a black pantsuit with a red turtleneck, both from JC Penney, and looking like some kind of vulture, while the rest just wore black. They bowed their heads, and Pastor Armstrong said a prayer.
The wake was held at Harry’s house. It had seemed like a nice idea, but now, sitting in the haze of mothballs, sniffing and wiping at their eyes and noses, they regretted it.
The walls were cluttered with clocks and photographs. Some of the pictures were framed and some tacked or taped to the peeling wallpaper. Almost all the people who smiled in the color photographs now sat in the room. The grainy, black-and-white images housed the dead, mainly–those whom Harry would soon neighbor in the Moccasin Hollow cemetery, a spattering of tombstones on the outskirts of town, a place where teenagers went to smoke and kiss.
Joe and Helen had left the kids home alone. “No TV.” They thought of them and their pink faces during the prayer.
The room was filled with folding chairs. Helen and Gertie had carried the apple pies into the kitchen and started the percolator, while Joe helped his father, an arm around his shoulders. “Here’s a place.” When Orland sat down on the couch, he noticed the hollows in the cushion, shaped over the years by his brother, and he thought of the satin upholstery of a coffin and the contours his brother’s body would mold forever within its lonely embrace.
It was a relief to sit, like remembering something forgotten.
When the prayer finished, Pastor Armstrong, gold-framed glasses and bulging eyes, of the Methodist Church, of the Loyal Order of the Elks, asked if anyone wanted to share anything about Harry. No one did. It was quiet for a while. Then Sam Diermeier raised his hand. “Yes, Sam?” the pastor said, and Sam began to talk:
“I remember when Harry and I was kids. . . . When we was kids, we used to go down and catch pollywogs together in Jasmine Crick.” He spoke a few more seconds, and his vowels elongated and he stretched his face forward.
The room was quiet except for his sobs–wet sounds that might have been chuckles anywhere else. The men examined their hands as the pastor walked over and patted Sam on the shoulder and Sam said, “I’m OK. I’m OK, all right? Just a second.”
The pastor said: “Sam? Do you want to go on?”
Sam nodded. He opened his mouth to say something.
On the other side of the room, Louise Withers, a distant cousin of the deceased whose cheeks were thick with moles, tried to sneak out a fart–but the sound trumpeted against the aluminum of her folding chair. She stood up quickly, as though something had bitten her.
The room was silent except for the ticking of the many clocks. They all bowed their heads, sitting there and pretending they hadn’t heard and pretending to pray and sucking in the stink of mothballs.
Orland began to snicker, but Gertie pinched him, so he stopped.
Eventually, Louise Withers sat down.
The next morning, three days after Harry’s death, Gertie and Helen sat together, sipping black coffee and watching the morning news. Raindrops tapped at the windows.
“Hair looks nice,” Helen said.
“Thank you. Just the usual, you know. My permanent.” She patted her white plumage and smiled. “Have to look nice for the funeral.”
“Is it going to be an open casket?” Helen said.
“Yes.” Gertie nodded. “They do a nice job. Last month–Was it last month?–last month, Frances looked so beautiful, natural. They’ll do a nice job on Orland. I mean, Harry. Poor Harry.”
Out the window, they could see Orland as he hobbled out of the barn in his coveralls, bracing each step with a shovel.
Helen made a clicking sound with her tongue and said, “Not supposed to be up and about.”
“Stubborn.”
They watched him walk a few steps, then rest, then walk, his free arm swaying, his footsteps tender.
“Both brothers,” Helen said. “Both hurt. It’s funny.”
“It is funny. Poor Orland,” Gertie said. “Come on, monkey man,” she said to the window.
Helen’s forehead got full of lines. “That’s terrible.”
“What? He thinks it’s funny.” She giggled. “It’s funny.”
Helen said, “I don’t understand why you don’t get him a cane.”
“Stubborn. Doesn’t want one. Stub-born.”
Orland disappeared around the side of the house.
“Poor Pa. He’s not doing so well. Of course, his hip and his eyes from the fall, but even worse is Harry dying. And even worse is his bowels.”
Helen’s cup paused near her lips.
“Yes, it’s just awful. You know I’ve told him, ‘You don’t have to have a good movement every day.’ But he thinks he has to. Says he’s uncomfortable. These shoes are uncomfortable. Just awful. I’m thinking about taking them back. That saleslady, she got me the wrong size, I think. Hm.”
“Poor Orland,” Helen said.
“Is that man a Negro?” Gertie said, toasting her mug at the television.
After that, there was a pause, and Helen didn’t bother saying anything.
“I ask because it’s hard to tell. His features are a little funny, a little different.” She looked at Helen and then at the screen and said, “Huh,” and drank her coffee.
While the women talked, Orland puttered about in the barn, crutching his sore steps with the shovel. Eighty-five years and he wasn’t ready to retire just yet.
Joe had milked alone that morning, as he had every day since his father tumbled off the mower. He was out in the pasture now, mending barbed wire, and Orland watched him for a few minutes through the square yawn of the double doors. The Holsteins looked more like Dalmatians, so small in the distance.
The peacocks cooed in the hayloft, and Orland listened. Their soft gossip reminded him of Gertie on the telephone. He tried to mimic their sounds, but it was more of a groan that escaped his lips, and the peacocks were quiet for a long time.
He fed the penned calves, and they licked grain from his shaking fingers. Their tongues were gray, and his skin grew tacky with a film of spit.
He latched the gate and sealed the grain bucket. Leaning against the pen, he breathed with his mouth open and watched the calves stare up at him, eyeballs bulging, necks extended, still greedy.
“You cows are a bunch of damned pigs.”
His eyes shuttered–words, bodies, smells, he remembered.
Teenaged and muscular, the both of them, with chest hair thick as crabgrass–corn fed. This was before Harry left the farm, before the merchant marine, college degree, then school teaching. “How can you just give up on the farming life? Just like that?” This was before grayness and wrinkles. This was well before things broke and were dead.
Christmas Eve was cold and filled with snowflakes. Harry chased after the pig, slipping, laughing as it snorted, trotting ahead. Finally, he tackled it, struggling in the snow and frozen mud of the pen. Orland stood nearby and said, “Steady, Harry.” And down came the sledgehammer, and the pig lay still with a dent under its ear.
When they opened its throat, the blood spread lavishly in the snow, scarlet-bright, and he remembered it looking as though it would taste good.
Arms folded, they waited for the pig to bleed out.
Then Orland packed a soggy red snowball and slung it at Harry. “Apple of my eye.” It hit him in the face. The slush of gore stained his skin pink as if he was angry–and he was.
They fought and punched each other everywhere but the face. Then they lay in the snow, resting, while foggy breaths geysered from their mouths.
Silent, they gutted the pig, and Orland noticed how terrible the reek of butchering was–so different than that pleasant odor of things newborn, of baby calves smelling somewhere between warm milk and chicken soup.
They had shared the memory, but now it was only him: Orland Jenson, standing alone in the barn, his right hand trembling like the legs of a dreaming dog.
The funeral began in one hour.
Joe Jenson, a broad man with a graying horseshoe hairline, stood before a full-length mirror and considered shaving. His whiskers itched, an almost-beard. He listened to Helen and her shower noises: splashing and song choruses. A few days earlier he’d had to help his father into the bath. Orland couldn’t stand long enough to shower, and they were afraid he’d slip and fall again if he tried to get into the tub alone. So Joe helped. He’d never seen his father naked before and was surprised by the yellowness of his skin, bony legs. They’d both been embarrassed, sure. When Helen stepped out of the bathroom, Joe watched her bare reflection dig through the closet and ask if he’d seen her black heels.
It was a peculiar moment, this time of remembering before acceptance.
Orland sat at the table stacking dominoes. He laid a triangle of three, then three more, rotated–a triangle of three, stacked and always turning, the ivory tower sprouted a foot off the table like a cavitied spine.
He’d been using his left hand, but decided to try his right. He folded his hands in his lap and squeezed, wringing away the tremors, trying to suffocate something that made him feel weak.
He thought of how it would go today, the funeral. He thought about everyone patting him on the back and asking questions about his health, offering their condolences while frowning, because it was just too bad, too bad. “How’re you holding up, Orland?” And he knew it was hard to know, how it had always been hard to know, for sure.
They had been three years apart–it was past tense, now.
They looked similar, but Harry, with fewer farming years, had aged better, healthier, had died faster too. Healthy enough to climb ladders, but old enough to break.
Harry’s dying had illuminated all the dead tissues in the hollow of Orland’s old body. He hadn’t quite realized it, but he was almost there.
He gripped the domino with his right hand. Steady. He leaned forward. He nodded. His hand was steady. His eyes were clear. He raised the domino–and his hand shook as if he were cold. “Damn,” he said, an exhausted sigh of a swear.
He switched hands, but the tremors were contagious. When he moved to place the domino on the tower, his left hand palsied. Things fell apart in a rattling cacophony–so loud it surprised him. He closed his eyes.
“What’s that, Pa?” Gertie said, shuffling from their bedroom. “What’s that? Are you OK? What’s that racket?” She surveyed the mess, and when he didn’t say anything, she turned and said, “Hm,” in a disapproving sort of way.
Everyone was sad. The pastor was up and talking. The shuffling of sleeves and tissues, the creaking of pews, the frequent coughing and sniffing made it hard to hear. The stained glass swarmed with light and color. The eulogy lasted 15 minutes.
Everyone sang, how sweet the sound. Everyone moved their mouths except Orland, who listened to the organ, irritated somehow, the sounds and pointless decoration reminding him of white peacocks.
Then it was time for Orland to speak. He waved Joe away and made it up the stairs and to the podium on his own–but everyone was worried for him, ready to jump up and catch his body, especially when he made his way back down.
Afterwards–before they drove their cars in a line with the headlights on, before they all huddled around the gaping hole in the ground, before, “He makes me lie down in green pastures,” before the pastor’s cell phone, mid-prayer, jingled “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” before the first spadeful of dirt slapped the coffin’s lid–in the church lobby, while eating cantaloupe and honeydew wrapped in ham on toothpicks, everyone agreed that Orland’s was a nice speech.
Gertie drove on the way back from the burial. The past five years, she always drove. She bent toward the steering wheel and said, “Bruises look better, Pa.”
“Are they?” He touched his cheek and watched the blond fields of corn.
“Healed slow.”
“I suppose.”
The road grew steep ahead, snaking up between a patch of trees to the bald crown of Ticklebelly Hill. The soil was brown up there, rusty brown like dried blood on a bandage. The engine groaned as they began to ascend.
Ticklebelly Hill: Before it became an asphalt road, the children of Turner had sledded its steep angle. Orland thought about him, Harry, and them, together as brothers, breathing at the same rhythm, many times, wrapped together on toboggans, alone and sliding on top of shovels.
And he told Gertie to go fast.
“What?” she said.
He told her again: “Please. Go faster.” Something rose from inside the hollow of his belly, something that could escape the gravity of the town, the church, the farm, his wife, his brother–a desire with unfolding wings. It was like praying–it came from what he felt inside.
And she said: “What? Why? Why?” as if he couldn’t hear her, and he could, but didn’t bother answering. She stepped down on the accelerator anyway.
Their movement matched his feeling. A final violent lurch through the trees and they emerged into the clearing of the summit. “Pa?” she said.
The wind made the car shudder. His vision blurred as if veiled by cataracts. He blinked clear, then said, “Go fast–no, faster,” because he wanted to feel the road fall out beneath him. He wanted the wind to slip him away.
He was almost there.
He wanted that fleeting weightlessness. Tears took form. He didn’t wipe at them. Concentrating, he took a shallow breath and let himself go.
He had been older. He had been tired of knowing who should have been first, tired of guarding himself against places and people and things that evoked memories. So he let himself go as the road fell out beneath him. He didn’t resist, he didn’t want to regret things that couldn’t be changed, so he let himself go. And he was lost somewhere, falling away from all his life.
———-
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Benjamin Percy is a native of Oregon. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in English from Brown University and is a master of fine arts candidate at Southern Illinois University. His short stories are forthcoming in The Florida Review, The Oyster Bay Review and other journals, and he is working on a novel.
