Gelid Years

   I have been cold a long time. I was raised in a small town in Southern Ohio on a dirt farm. Dirt was all my father raised in the years of trying to raise vegetables, strawberries, cows, pigs and I don't remember what else. I think he now has a junk yard. He couldn't even raise children. I was the only one and he didn't do such a good job with me. I was always so damn cold except in the kitchen when Ma was baking, which was usually. I used to sit on the bent-up linoleum in front of the fire-box with a cat on my lap and watch her as I licked the frosting from the eggbeaters. She used to talk to me a little but she always seemed far away and never heard what I said so I kept quiet, ripening there next to the stove feeling the cat purr in my lap. When I got older I wondered why she married him. She was taller than he was and she had wispy blond hair and a narrow waist. Her blouses were always too tight and she kept her cigarette pack in her right breast pocket which made her right breast look square and lumpy, especially next to the left one when she was sweating and her nipple showed through. All the counter tops had burns in them from her setting her lit cigarettes down being careful not to get ashes in the batter since she used to sell the cakes. He would come in, in the afternoon, from either whacking at the strawberry field with a hoe or chasing pigs that had got out and have a couple of beers and some doughnuts. He had big hands and when he'd open a beer he held the can up about eye level and popped off the flip-tab with the same hand. He'd grin and take a string of noisy swallows from it and set it down and light a cigarette, or one of those short, black cigars, and the drops of beer on his lip soaked the end of the cigarette or ran down into the bluish stubble on his chin while she worked hard over her dough. If he ran out of cigarettes he'd go over to her and turn her around roughly by the shoulders and grab the pack in her shirt pocket. If it was cold or rainy out or in the winter when he had nothing more to do outside in the afternoon, he'd chase me out of the kitchen and into the yard. The cat would hide under the stove and I'd have nowhere to go but the barn. Damp and shivering in the hay by the window in the barn loft, I learned to hate him.
   I spent a lot of rainy afternoons by that loft window and I remember those times perfectly. I could hear the goats moving   below in their stalls, munching fast on their cuds and sometimes taking long smooth sounding slurps from their water pail and I always envied those goats being able to chew cuds and eat grass while I was hungry in the loft with all that hay. The yard outside was a greasy, glistening green with the layer of smooth mud that the poultry had swallowed all the gravel out of, and the ducks waddled around, running their bills through it and wagging their tails that funny way ducks do. To my right was the corner of the house, what I could see of it that wasn't blocked out by the barn. There were gutters along the eaves of the house but no drain pipe leading to the ground so the water came off in a kind of waterfall hitting the kitchen walk that reminded me of a cow peeing on a flat rock. Down the hill from the kitchen where the roof water ran was a deeper muddy place the pigs used to lie in when they weren’t busy. There was always one big sow and usually a lot of piglets and they'd constantly talk to each other or to themselves, scratch or blow bubbles in a puddle. Years later, when I saw my first stripper in a bar rolling her hips, with the jelly on the backs of her legs jumping around, she reminded me so much of a pig with its eyes half-closed scratching~its nates on a big rock that I burst out laughing so hard I knocked the table and drinks over, and the stripper stopped stripping and looked at me kind of hurt. The bouncers picked me out of the chair I was sprawled in and launched me out the back door into the gravel parking lot. I was still laughing wild guffaws lying there with stones sticking in my back and an orange, autumn moon shining on me.
   The first laugh I ever got from pigs must have been when I was twelve. I was looking out the loft window in the evening after a rain with the air blushing pink from the sunset and the starlings giving their last rusty-hinge creaks of the day while he milked the goats into tin pails. The squirts were long at first and them got shorter and quicker, and I could picture the goats squirming toward the end when his jagged fingernails were digging into their teats. Finally, he finished and I watched him cross the yard to the kitchen with the two pails. There was one wiseacre little pig following him, bumping one of the pails with its nose, chatting to itself, "Wot wot wot," and breaking up the wots with a short squeal every now and then, when suddenly he spun around and kicked at the pig, his other foot kicked out and both feet went up, the milk pails with them, and he hit the ground with a hoarse wheeze I could hear from the loft. Then he slid down that greasy duck slime slope, rolling once, covered with milk and ooze. All the pigs were poking at him for the milk and half stepping on him but he lay still for a minute and I laughed hard; he wasn't through yet. He got up, coughing from losing his wind, grabbed the ax from the kitchen woodpile, and hacked a piglet to death. I felt sick and stopped laughing as I ducked and the bloody ax hit the hay behind me with a sudden rustle. He went inside and slammed doors and then the lights in the house went out except the one in their bedroom when that too went out with a sudden smash of glass, something breaking in the yard, their table lamp I guess. I waited for sleep, but I was shivering and so scared, I got up and brought the ax downstairs, washed it off, and put it back by the splitting block. Then I buried the pig and returned to sleep with the goats.
   During the winter when I was about thirteen he decided to go into dairying. He bought six cows, some black and white, some brown and white, and milked them by hand. It wasn't bad being in the barn during evening milking because he was always loaded, singing to the cows and squirting the cats with milk, but he was in an awful mood, in the morning, having to get up hungover in the dark. I used to have to help him by washing the udders and I hated it. If a cow wouldn't get up he'd kick at it and it would get scared, its feet would slip in the gutter behind it, its neck would be lunging in the stanchion, and he would get madder and start swinging a bucket at its head. Finally, it would get up still swaying its head because he was still belting it. When he was milking, he'd wear a funny one-legged stool strapped to his seat to take the weight off his haunches and the cats would wind around his legs and he'd kick at them and slip around on the stool but he never went down. He drowned a cat in the gutter once, holding it under the piss and slurry with his foot while he went on milking. The spotted, cross-eyed orange one.
   One morning I came down to the kitchen and Ma was there wearing the holey, grimy sweaters he wore milking, jeans and his big rubber boots and said she and I would be milking together for a while. We both washed udders and she taught me how to milk. She'd squat on the same one-legged stool that was strapped on and looked like a tail when she walked and I squatted in front of her leaning back between her legs with both hands on the cow's teats and her hands over mine doing the work until I got the hang of squeezing off the top of the teat with my first finger and pulling the milk out with the rest of my hand. Then we'd both milk the same cow, she doing the two left quarters and me doing the other two at the same time and we'd talk under the cow. That was about the nicest time I can remember. I stopped going to school; she stopped baking; we were outside doing things together-- it wasn't like work-- and at night we'd watch the T.V. and drink chocolate. Then one night he came back. We were sitting under a blanket on the couch watching a movie and he came in slamming doors, grabbed me, opened the heavy living room door and threw me out the storm door. I think I was crying before I hit the snowbank. That walk across the yard was a long one and it was cold out. I lay with the goats, but I still thought I was going to freeze. I yawned through my tears and every time I did I would shake all over. I was afraid I would die like that little pig and-that orange cat.
   One day in the spring I came across a box full of magazines called Game Bird Gazettes and in the back of the Gazettes were classified ads for all kinds of birds. One ad was for an assortment of fertile eggs, "EXOTIC POULTRY ALL COLORS OF THE RAINBOW," it said, and since I had a little money from helping dig out Terrell Crouch's septic tank, I sent away and was lucky the eggs came since it was an old issue. I hatched most of the eggs under ducks, and the chicks all looked about the same until they got bigger, and then I could compare them to pictures in the Gazettes. I found I had chickens called Blue Andalusians, Black Sumatras and Red Indian Aseels; there was even a Rumpless Araucana-- I figured I'd hit the jackpot. I cobbed some cages together in a corner of the barn and entered the exotic chicken business. Terrell Crouch's son, Gilbert, was in the seventh grade with me and Terrell raised fighting cocks and wanted to breed some Aseel blood into his line so we would strike an occasional deal through Gilbert and I'd bring the birds out to the Crouch's on my bicycle. I'd put the chickens in two empty grain bags on my back. The bike was an old rusted one with a bent wheel that made it feel like I was riding through potholes or down railroad ties when I was going fast. The birds would flap around sometimes and I looked like I was wearing burlap waterwings. I never gave Terrell my best birds but I gave him good deals since it was his backed up septic tank that got me started. I was starting to save money, but my bones would get cold every time I went in the barn when my chickens were quiet, because I was afraid he killed them all, but he was into a routine between milking and drinking. I think he was scared of losing his mortgage because looking back on it, even in those days, nobody could make much of a living from only six cows.
   The chicken business went along smoothly until a raccoon killed my best cock. I was mad. I set up a barricade of hay bales in the barn a little ways from where I'd put a cage with what was left of my murdered rooster for bait in it and that night I hid behind the bales with his shotgun and the big flashlight and waited for that coon to show. I must have fallen asleep because I don't remember hearing the first thumps, but when I started hearing them I sat up real slow and put the gun on the hay buttress. I held the barrels and flashlight with the same hand and put my other hand on the triggers and turned on the light. The thumping from the coon picking the cage up and
dropping it stopped. The coon was behind the cage but as I started to yell to flush him he ran out. I pulled the first trigger and the gun slammed my shoulder and then the second barrel went off by mistake and kicked me over backwards. When I shined the light through the hayseed still floating in the air, the raccoon was just kicking his last death kicks and I went to bed satisfied, feeling like I could protect what was mine and like I had taken a step.
   On my sixteenth birthday, in the morning before I got up, he killed all my chickens by wringing their necks. I went to my room and got the money I had hidden, and then went down to the kitchen. She was at the stove and he was sitting at the table. I went over and put my hands on her hips and she turned around and hugged me. Up close I could see that her blond hair was starting to turn white. I ran a hand through it and brought out a long, loose, wavy one and wrapped it around my finger where it stayed. Then I went to the side of the table and put both my hands on the back of one of those heavy oak kitchen chairs you hardly ever see anymore and I said, "Father." He looked up, never having heard the word before, and when he did I already had that chair moving. I swung it so fast it whistled and it hit him awfully hard. I walked out of the house and down our dirt road to the highway and thumbed to town. I went to the bus station and got on the first long distance bus headed south. I guess I didn't kill him because she wrote a while ago saying he had a junk yard.