Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

A SNARE AS OLD AS SOLOMON

FRANCHETTE BELTED HER car coat over her swollen belly and eased her way down the icy back steps. Ramer was still in the shed. Her breath made little puffs of smoke in the chill morning air as she stumbled down the path toward the road. She hurried as if she could still hear the cries coming from the crate out front, or the sound of the hatchet on the hen’s neck.

She didn’t look back as she made for the dirt road beyond the trees. The crocuses she’d planted were beginning to put up green shoots. It was going to be an early spring, and that was good. Soon she wouldn’t have to worry about the pipes freezing, or about having to carry firewood in her condition, when Ramer went out drinking and left her alone. She couldn’t stop to look at the plants just now, or to check for deer tracks in the yard. She wished she could do something about the prisoner in the crate, but she couldn’t. She had left the kettle boiling on the stove, and the butcher knife laid out on the newspapers, just like Ramer had asked her to, but she had to get out of there.

If she ignored the catch in her side, she could be around the bend to Della’s trailer in five minutes. Della worked the lunch shift at her uncle’s diner in town, so she’d be leaving soon. If Franchette said she had a doctor’s appointment on account of the baby, Della would let her ride in to town with her for nothing. She couldn’t tell Della the real reason she wanted to go. Della’s man was living over across the river with a bleached blond dental assistant, and he never sent Della a cent for the kids or the payments on the Pontiac. Della would laugh and say that pregnant women always got fanciful, that Ramer was being protective like a man ought to be, and he was a heap better than some. Maybe he was being protective, but Franchette didn’t think so. She thought he was saving his own pride at the cost of hers. And the worst part was the way he’d done it. It was like the Bible story turned inside out, but she hadn’t seen that until today. Della couldn’t be made to understand. She’d say: “Ramer killed that old stray hen. So what?”

It had been no use trying to talk about it to Ramer either. They had been married a year now, and already the talk had run out. Used to be, Ramer would listen to her way of looking at things, her dreaming out loud, but now when she tried to talk to him, he’d look at her for a minute and then go back to what he was doing. It wasn’t all his fault, though. Being out of work was hard on a man’s pride. When he took her high school diploma down off the wall, she hadn’t said anything, because she knew it was reminding him that he’d quit in tenth grade, and maybe if he hadn’t he’d be working. Things had been different when he had the job in the sawmill. He’d wanted her to finish high school before the wedding and at graduation he’d showed up in his white tie and suit coat and had taken her out to dinner at the Beef Barn to celebrate. Those were happy times. They talked about her getting a typing job in town so that they could buy a new truck and maybe a dish-shaped antenna for the television. He had let her go and get the birth control pills at the clinic, so they could save up and have a few things before the babies started to arrive. But that was before. Now if she even brought home a book from the bookmobile, he accused her of showing off her education. So Franchette had given up reading and started a quilt. Sometimes she thought something had died inside Ramer, and that he’d be damned if he’d let it live anywhere else.

That morning Ramer had been staring out the kitchen window, same as always. The want ads page of the Scout lay crumpled beside his coffee mug, ready to be thrown out with the coffee grounds. First thing after breakfast (oatmeal mostly; eggs at the first of the month), Franchette would clear up the dishes and Ramer would run his finger down the want ads. It never took him very long to go through them. Since the mine shut down and the sawmill laid off, there weren’t any jobs; and if there was one-say, painting a barn-there were twenty people trying to get it, and the one closest related to the barn owner got hired on. So far that hadn’t been Ramer. He was staring out at the pasture and the hills beyond as if he were looking for deer to come down the ridge, but he wasn’t seeing. Franchette cleared up the breakfast dishes in silence.

No use trying to talk to him. No use, either, asking for the want ads. She’d tried that when he first got laid off, and he’d given her a cold, dead look and said: “What’s the matter, Miss High and Mighty? You want to be the boss of this family now?” She’d snapped back that it would be better than the welfare, and Ramer had left the house and hadn’t come back for three hours. After that, she’d try to sneak and read them before she put them in the garbage, but it hadn’t been any use. Ramer had seen to that.

“I’m going to kill that damned chicken!” Ramer had shouted, bringing his fist down hard on the kitchen table.

Franchette wanted to tell him to leave it be. It wasn’t doing any harm this early in the spring. But she knew that taking up for it would only make him madder. Anyway, she didn’t think he could catch it; that old hen knew about people, at least enough to stay out of range. She was a scraggly old Red, gone wild from somebody’s farm, and living on whatever she could forage. Wasn’t enough meat on her to make a mouthful; anybody could see that. All winter she’d clucked and rambled across their yard, a friendly sight to Franchette, and to Ramer a sign of one more thing he couldn’t control. Sometimes he would go out and shy rocks at her, but he never came close to a hit, and the next day, she’d be back like nothing had happened.

A couple of days after the first thaw, the hen had showed up with one puny chick following behind her-probably the only survivor of an early nest. They’d pecked and cackled at each other in the patches of late snow, while Ramer sat at the window and watched them, day after day.

He never made any move to catch the pair of them, and never said anything about their presence in the yard. He just watched them with eyes like slits. Franchette thought Ramer might be easing up toward the old hen, seeing as how he was going to be a father himself in a few months’ time, but that hope had ended today. He must have been planning it for a couple of days, since he put the wooden crate on the front porch and the gun by the front door.

He hadn’t said anything else after the first outburst. He just grabbed the half-eaten toast from Franchette’s plate and walked out into the yard. Franchette watched him from the window. He stood there stock-still in his work clothes, no coat or gloves, and waited for the hen to come closer. Then he threw down a piece of bread. The hen cocked her head at him, like she didn’t like what she saw. She bustled away toward the trees, but her chick hadn’t learned better. It came up to see what had fallen. Ramer tossed a smaller piece of bread and backed up toward the porch. The chick followed him at a careful distance, gulping down bread crumbs, until Ramer was on the porch, tossing crumbs into the flower bed by the steps. The hen came a few yards out of the trees and shrieked at her baby, but it was too dumb or too hungry to hear her. Finally, Ramer dumped the rest of the bread crumbs into the flower bed and eased the wooden crate toward the edge of the porch. When the chick bent down to peck the bread, he leaned out and slammed the crate down on top of it. Franchette put her fist in her mouth to keep from yelling at him to let it loose. She thought he would wring its neck then and there, but instead he got up and slammed into the house.

“What did you want to do that for?” she asked when he got inside.

“You’ll find out,” he said without looking at her. He was watching the crate.

The chick had found it couldn’t get out, and was flapping around inside, screaming in terror. You could see it through the wooden slats, thrashing against the top and sides. The hen could see it, too. She answered its cries with distressed sounds of her own and edged nearer the box. Every step or so, she’d cock her head and look up at the house where Ramer waited, and she’d back up a few feet, but the chick’s cries always pulled her closer. It took a good five minutes for her to get to the crate. The chick’s cries were coming louder than ever, and she circled the crate, peering in at it and screeching.

Ramer picked up the gun and eased open the door.

“Oh, Ramer, don’t!” Franchette whispered, grabbing his sleeve.

“I guess that settled it,” he said, grinning at her, and he was gone.

She wished she had gone back to the kitchen and not watched Ramer level the gun at the frantic hen. The hen had looked away from the crate when he came out; she had to have seen the gun, but she stayed there by the crate as if it didn’t matter. He got her with one shot. The chick was still shrieking inside the crate when Ramer picked up its mother’s body and carried it off to the shed to dress it out. He would scald off the feathers and gut it, and then he’d bring it to the house for Franchette to cook. Franchette knew that if she ever tried to eat that hen, she’d never be done with vomiting, but that wasn’t why she had run.

It was the way Ramer had grinned when he said “I guess that settled it.” It had puzzled her for a while, trying to think what it reminded her of. She had been setting the kettle on to boil when it came to her. After she’d asked for the want ads that time, and then gotten Della to ask her uncle if he could use another waitress, Ramer had told her to wait till after Christmas to start to work, and she’d been happy that he’d taken it so well. It had almost been like old times again for a couple of weeks. Ramer had been so loving again. He’d thrown away her birth control pills, because they cause cancer, he said. And he told her he’d use something to make it safe. He never had, though. And when around Christmastime, she’d known she was pregnant, he smiled just that same funny way, and said that settled it. She was going to be a mother. She couldn’t work. No wife of his was going to leave her kid and go to work. He didn’t seem very happy about the baby, though; he never wanted to talk about what to name it, or anything. He’d just say that she had to stay home and look after it.

It wasn’t until she saw him shoot the hen today that she understood what he’d done and why. It was like the story about Solomon: when the king offered to cut the disputed baby in two, and the real mother was willing to give it up rather than see it killed. That poor old hen had been willing to do anything to save her baby. And Ramer had tried to make her give up her life, the chance to make something of herself, using their baby as a weapon. But Ramer was no Solomon; he would have cut the baby in two, just to make sure that everyone was equally unhappy.

Ramer hadn’t even noticed her when she came in the shed. She had been crying, but they were silent tears. By the time she had walked from the kitchen out to the shed, she wasn’t angry anymore, just sorrowful that everything had turned out so wrong, and that Ramer had turned into somebody she had to escape from. The gun had been propped up against the wheelbarrow; he didn’t even turn around when she picked it up. He was intent on his butchering, and his hands were red to the wrists. Franchette walked around in front of him, balancing the gun around her swollen belly. He did look up then, just as she fired. She put the gun in his hands, and went back to the house to wash away the blood. The hen’s blood and Ramer’s were all mixed together on her hands.

She spent the walk to Della’s house taking deep breaths, trying to feel calm again, and thinking how she should react when she got home that afternoon and discovered that Ramer had shot himself in the shed while cleaning his gun. Maybe she should be real upset, and then say that she couldn’t sit around the house all day dwelling on the tragedy, and that a job would take her mind off things.

She stopped at Della’s mailbox to catch her breath. In the white tube labeled Scout was a rolled-up newspaper like the one she’d left behind on the breakfast table. Franchette eased it out and carried it up the walk to Della’s front door. On the way to town she was going to read the want ads.