Chester Wyrick sat on the front porch with his elbows on his knees and his fingers twirling a cigarette, looking intently at the empty road that ran up the holler. To his left lay a hubcap full of cigarette butts. His smoke rose silently, eventually blending in with the overcast sky. No more than ten cars traveled the dirt road every day, but Chester followed each with his eyes until the dust settled, long after the car was out of earshot.
Just inside the door the beat of Mildred's head banging against the wall provided a tuneless rhythm for Chester's vigil. He saw her for what she was, an idiot, and he treated her like a mule. "Two hundred and thirty pounds of soup beans and corn bread," he would tell his wife, "and she ain't able to taste the difference between that and hay. Whyn't you keep her in the barn?" Birdie Wyrick always responded to Chester's bluntness with all the indignation of a disturbed chicken, and it would take a minute or two of wheezing before her small, frail body could muster a response. "She goes to the barn, I go to the barn. That's all they is to it."
When Chester was sober he would sit on the porch all day, getting up only to let the hound in, or to eat. When he was drunk, Birdie never saw him. He had been sober now for a month, and Birdie was beginning to prepare meals for him again, whenever her arthritis let her. "Chester, you better git in here 'fore yore taters gets cold." Chester squashed out his cigarette and shuffled to the door.
The room he entered was so familiar that its furnishings impressed him about as much as his own hands. Directly across from the front door were blue plastic egg cartons tacked on the wall in the shape of a cross which he never saw anymore. Nor the picture of Jesus kneeling in prayer, nor the Bible Reader's Certificate over the light switch. He always saw Mildred, though, for part of the time she was not in her chair in front of the wall that had a dent in it, and her absence reminded him of her presence.
Now she was in the kitchen with her hands tied to the chair, gravy running down her dress. Birdie was sitting in front of her, bent over, grabbing at Mildred's feet and trying to pull her stockings back on. The scene always reminded Chester of trying to shoe his horse. He walked past them and sat down at the table, or at least tried to, but his left leg did not follow the rest of his body. "Turn me loose, Mildred." He recited the request like a worn phrase from the Lord's Prayer, and pried her hand open from its grip on his pant leg. The event went entirely unnoticed by Birdie.
"Now Chester, you jest set there and eat. I'm a-gonna tell you somethin'. Back of this when you were gone I took one of them spells again, and it like to kill me. My wind cut off right here"--her gnarled hand crept up to her throat--"and hit lasted longer'n any other'n. I phoned up that nurse and I said, 'Sally, I think the Lord's a-comin' fer me this time.' Well she said 'Birdie, I won't hear tell of sech a thing. You jest set right there and I'll check you.'
"Now Chester, hit weren't but five minutes when that nurse was a-knockin' at the door. 'Come in,' I told her, fer I knowed it i was her. Well, she come in and set just zackly where you're a-settin' now and said, 'Birdie, you tell me what's wrong.' Well I told her, and she checked me. Then she set back down again and looked me straight in the eye and said, 'Birdie, you need to move to where someone can take keer of you.' 'I know it, Sally,' I said, 'but you know they ain't nary a one knows Mildred like I know her, and ain't no institution goin' to take keer of her. They done showed me all I want to see. You know when we got her back from Rest Haven they had starved her? Why her legs weren't no bigger'n broomsticks.' 'But you won't be no good taking keer of her if she finds you dead on the floor one day,' she said. 'I know it,' I told her."
Chester was responding with the exclamations appropriate to a Sunday morning sermon while he methodically ate his potatoes and okra. He paid as much attention to his wife's well-practiced monologues as he did to Mildred's intermittent grunts and squeals. He could never completely ignore them, however, and the waning of his patience was the pinch that reminded him that his relationship with them had not totally drifted into stupor.
"Well move, dad burn it!" Chester's prescriptions made up in directness what they lacked in detail. Birdie explained again that she'd have to sell the farm in order to afford the nursing home, and concluded with a stirring account of her affection for Mildred, and her dedication to being Mildred's caretaker. Chester returned to the porch when she paused for a wheeze. Birdie untied Mildred, led her back to her station across from the plastic cross, and gave her the Prince Albert can to play with. She was not finished with Chester, so she stood at the screen door with her nose pressed against it and continued her case.
"Chester, I'm a sick woman and they's days I don't think I can make hit any longer. And I know that nurse is right. But you know I've deeded that land to Mildred when I die, and I just cain't sell what's rightfully hern. Now the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and He's done give me Mildred to keer fer and He's done give her me, and if death comes I aim to stand between her and it, I love her that much. And if the Lord's fixin' to take me back I just pray He takes us both at the same time. That's all they is to it."
"The Lord ain't took her in forty-four years, so I don't see why He won't give her another forty-four," Chester suggested, then turned his attention to a car that was approaching from a distance. Birdie turned back into the living room to check if Mildred had wet yet, then she sat in a rocking chair across the room.
"Ain't no old folks home kin love you like I do. I knowed that ever since you came back from Rest Haven half starved." Mildred held up the Prince Albert can with two fingers and stared at the wall to the right of her. Birdie sighed and automatically switched on the radio. Then she lifted her heavy Bible from its little table onto her lap, opened to Ezekiel, and promptly fell asleep.
Meanwhile Chester stared into the cloud of dust the car had stirred up. A sleek, impudent dog with a collar dangling from its neck trotted out of the cloud, down the road, and across the pasture to Chester's right. He coughed and spat when it entered the woods, then returned to his vigil. The radio preacher's voice inside rose and subsided like ocean waves, powerful in its movement, yet thin as water in substance. Chester heard the waves, but was no longer lifted or convicted by them. Like a seasoned sailor, he had learned to ignore the waves, feeling their absence on shore more than their presence at sea. The preacher reiterated the importance of getting saved and Henry and Hazel Slaughter concluded with a song about heaven's gates and the golden street. Mildred banged asynchronously to the music, and moaned through the next song. Chester's attention, though, was fixed on a pileated woodpecker, slowly and methodically beating its bill into a dead limb of the massive oak tree that overshadowed the house.
Before too long, Birdie shuffled to the door. "Chester, they's something wrong out back. Mildred's standing by the door as upset as she can be, and her chickens is raisin' such a fuss, I don't know what to do." Chester was accustomed to Birdie's over-cautious interpretation of anything concerning Mildred, especially when Birdie herself was feeling sickly. The large woodpecker had paused when Birdie came to the door, and flapped away when Chester coughed and answered: "Mildred's okay. She just gets excited over that gospel music."
"Now, Chester," Birdie persisted, "you go out back and see what's a-troublin' those chickens. This arthritis has just about got me down, or you know I'd do it myself. My nerves is all tore up and so is Mildred's." Her voice became more nasal as she harped, but Chester was unmoving. She stopped, then tried a different approach: "A fox has got into those chickens."
Chester rose slowly and deliberately, heading for the bedroom and his gun, muttering, "There ain't no fox. Hit's only that ol' dog came prancing through here." Without stopping, he picked up his gun and signaled to his hound with one motion of his hand, then proceeded out the back door. His irritation at leaving his post was almost compensated by the prospect of shooting a fox. Mildred's grunting and squealing generally intensified when anyone bustled, and now, besides grunting, she buried her head into Birdie's small shoulder, almost knocking her over. Birdie deftly embraced the door frame, as she would hold on to a tree in a stiff windstorm, and called after Chester to be careful. He did not look back.
When Chester arrived at the hen house, his hound was yapping, but the chickens had quieted down. He poked the door open with the barrel of his shotgun, and the squawking and cackling returned in full chorus. He quickly counted them, pulled the door to, and set off to the back pasture for the one that was missing. The sun was low in the sky, and had just emerged from beneath the cloud mass which covered that corner of the earth like a poorly fitting pot lid. The angled rays produced more shadows than light, but the effect was like a divine attempt to illuminate Chester's hunt. His hound dashed off to the far corner of the field; Chester followed, winded but resolute.
The hound waited for Chester before entering the woods. The sun had now set, leaving an eerie, bright golden hue bathing the forest, casting no shadow, having no apparent source, reflected from the clouds. Chester preceded the hound through the spent blackberry bushes into the corner of the woods, where the same strange light glowed. The fox whose existence he doubted was not there. Instead, the sleek bold dog with the dangling collar stood guard over a bloody mass of feathers, saucy and satisfied.
Chester lifted his gun to his shoulder and shot. The dog rolled backwards on the ground three times as if kicked by a mule, yelped, and began his escape, straight toward his assassin. Chester had already begun to reload when the wounded dog dashed between his legs and back into the pasture, leaving a trail of churned, bloody leaves. Chester turned and fired again. When the echoes of the blast died, he heard only distant yelping. His hound bounded off in pursuit; he took a violent coughing spell, then slowly followed the bloody trail that led toward home.
As he approached his house, the remaining light allowed him to see the shadowy shapes of his family waiting for him. Birdie and Mildred were celebrating the hunt by a wrestling match in the back yard. He had not seen them wrestle for years, but remembered fondly how Mildred had seemed to enjoy the game. Mildred would grunt and squeal, with Birdie tickling her and wheezing, until Birdie would give out or Mildred would scramble away. Now Mildred was larger and Birdie smaller, but what Chester saw was his wife lying on top of Mildred's grunting body, pinning her to the ground.
When Chester arrived at the back yard, the picture became clear. The intruding dog lay dead just two feet from the wrestlers, his belly ripped open, his collar still hanging. Chester's hound guarded the prey and Mildred, who, despite her grunting, seemed unable to throw off Birdie's small frame. Birdie, however, lay perfectly still; dead, in fact. Her hands were bloody and scratched from fighting off the mad dog's crazed attacks on her and Mildred; her neck torn and bleeding from its delirious lunges.
Chester sucked for breath and clutched his chest when he saw them. He shuffled forward, knelt by the human altar, and gingerly touched Birdie's blue face. Mildred once again grabbed his pant leg, and though he reached down to pry it loose, his hand only rested on hers.
Ray Downing was a physician working in a clinic for the rural poor in Luttrell, Tennessee when this article appeared.
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