Omensetter’s Luck

2

Henry Pimber became convinced that Brackett Omensetter was a foolish, dirty, careless man.

First Omensetter ran a splinter in his thumb and with amusement watched it swell. The swelling grew alarmingly and Mat and Henry begged him to see Doc Orcutt about it. Omensetter merely stuffed the thumb in his mouth and puffed his cheeks behind the plug. Then one morning, with Omensetter holding close, Mat's hammer slipped. Pus flew nearly across the shop. Omensetter measured the distance it shot and smiled with pride, washing the wound in the barrel without a word.

He stored his pay in a sock which hung from his bench, went about oblivious of either time or weather, habitually permitted things which he'd collected like a schoolboy to slip through holes in his trousers. He kept worms under saucers, stones in cans, poked the dirt all the time with twigs, and fed squirrels navy beans and sometimes noodles from his hands. Broken tools bemused him; he often ate lunch with his eyes shut; and, needless to say, he laughed a lot. He let his hair grow; he only intermittently shaved; who knew if he washed; and when he went to pee, he simply let his pants drop.

Then Omensetter bought some chickens from Olus Knox, among them one old hen whose age, as Knox told Henry after, he thought his buyer hadn't noticed. The next morning the hen was gone while the rest ran fearfully and flew in hops. At first they thought she was lost somewhere in the house, but the girls soon found her. They were diving, Omensetter said, hiding under the lifting fog, bending low to see beneath it the supernatural world and one another's bare legs stalking giants. The hen lay dead by the open well and the dog crouched growling at its lip. Henry had come to collect the rent because his wife insisted that he go in person — face to face is safer, she said — and Omensetter showed him the eyes of the fox reflect the moon. The girls swung in graceful turns around the hole, their dresses palely visible. His eyes are like emeralds, they said. They are green emeralds and yellow gold. That's because they're borrowed from the fire at the center of the earth and they see like signals through the dark. Then Omensetter told them of foxes' eyes: how they burn the bark from trees, put spells on dogs, blind hens, and melt the coldest snow. To Henry, kneeling gingerly upon a rotten board, they were dim points of red, and his heart contracted at the sight of their malice.

How do you plan to get him out, he asked, rising in front of Omensetter's chest.

You can see how bad the well wanted him. He'll have to stay where he's been put. That's the way it happened and maybe the well will tire of him and toss him out.

Henry tried to laugh. Kneeling had made him dizzy and a button was missing from Omensetter's coat. Our fox is in our well, our fox is in our well, our well was empty belly, now our fox is in our well, the girls sang, whirling more rapidly.

Be careful there, he said, those boards are rotten and one's missing. The cover should have been repaired.

It was his well really, and he fell silent when he remembered it. Then he tried a cautious, apologetic smile. It might be the fox that had been stealing Knox's chickens, he thought. That would be like Omensetter's luck, certainly — for the fox to seize the bitterest hen, gag on her as he fled, and then fall stupidly through the ground. What an awful thing: to have the earth open to swallow you almost the moment you took the hen in your jaws. And to die in a tube. Henry found he couldn't make a fist. At best, the fox must be badly bruised, terribly cramped, his nose pressed into the damp well wall. By this time his coat would be matted and his tail fouled, and his darkness would extend to the arriving stars. A dog would bloody his paws and break his teeth against the sides and then wear out his body with repeated leaping. By morning — hunger, and the line of the sun dipping along the wall, the fetid smells — bitter exhaustion of spirit. No wonder he burned with malice.

You know what those eyes are? They're a giant's eyes.

The girls squealed.

Sure — that hole goes through to the land of the giants.

Omensetter struck Henry heavily on the back.

As a boy Henry hadn't been able to carry a bucket brimming from the well; he couldn't spade or hoe with strength or plow; he couldn't saw or wield a beaverish ax. He stumbled when he ran; when he jumped, he slipped; and when he balanced on a log, he fell. He hated hunting. His nose bled. He danced, though he could never learn to fish. He didn't ride, disliked to swim; he sulked. He was last up hills, stayed home on hikes, was always "it." His sisters loved to tease, his brothers to bully him. And now he couldn't even make a fist.

Honestly — what are you going to do?

Omensetter swung happily about the well with the girls, their bodies casting a faint shadow on the yellowish grass.

Naa-thing, they sang, naa-thing.

Omensetter must feel the cruelty of his mood, Henry thought, or was he also free of that? Shed of his guilty skin, who wouldn't dance?

Of course you can't do that, he said; you'll have to get him out. He'll starve down there.

He'll have to stay where the hen has put him, Omensetter said firmly. Spring will float him to the top.

That poor animal? — you can't do that. It's dangerous besides.

But Henry thought how he would fare if the earth spoke of his crimes. Suppose the instant you uttered a cutting word, your cheek bled.

Anyway, you'll have to board it up… the girls, he said.

Suppose your tongue split when you lied.

This well, it's in a manner of speaking… mine. I totally forgot — the existence of… He sighed. Murder would also be suicide.

I'll help you close it up, he said.

Oh they enjoy it, Omensetter said. They'd cry if I covered it.

The girls pulled gaily at their father's arms. He began to whirl like a ribboned pole.

How long… do you think… that giant's eyes… will last?

Henry held unsteadily to a sapling.

You could shoot him, I guess. You have a gun.

The well wants him… maybe he'll get out… hooh… it's getting dark, girls… no… whoosh… stop.

I'll do it then, Henry said, and he imagined the shot leaping from the barrels of his gun to rush at the fox.

Lamps lit in the house. Henry measured the walls of his sky while he drifted away to the buggy. It wasn't dippered yet, but soon there'd be nothing to aim by, for darkness would silence the fox's eyes. The grass had begun to glisten. Animals felt pain, he understood, but never sorrow. That seemed right. Henry could crush a finger, still the wound might be a war in a distant country for all the concern he could let it cause him, he lived so fearfully; but such a creature as the fox filled up the edges of its body like a lake the shot would dapple as it entered. You could startle an animal, but never surprise. The buggy's seats were slick, the dew heavy. He thought he should have a cloth somewhere, a piece of toweling. There were bats overhead. Yes, here's where he had it. Henry began to dry a place for himself. Fluttering like leaves, the bats flew securely. And would the stars be startled, looking up, to find the fox out burning in their early skies?

There you are, you've been reasonably careful, you've kept your butt dry.

Henry spoke crossly and the carriage began to bounce him.

So the well went through to the land of the giants. Why not? Should he turn away from that — that callousness and that romance — to Mrs. Henry Pimber's firm prim mouth? her festive unlatching hands?

Omensetter's a natural-born politician, Olus Knox had said; he's what they call the magnetic kind. How inadequate that image was, Henry thought, when he could draw the heart right out of your side. Jethro Furber had been dramatic, as usual, painfully pinching his hands together. That man, he declared, lives like a cat asleep in a chair. Mat smiled gently: a view full of charity, he said; but Tott was laughing at the sight of Furber actually holding the pieces of himself together while he tried to condemn Omensetter's simply harmony and ease, as Henry guessed, with such a tranquil image. Yet how could Omensetter bear that terrible pair of eyes? Of — of course, Furber stuttered. A cat's a pretty thing, of course. How pretty a man? Is it attractive in a man to sleep away his life? take a cow's care? refuse a sparrow of responsibility? Tott shrugged. The cat's an unmitigated egotist, a slothful beast, slave to its pleasure. No need to preach, Tott said, nettled; cats were his idols. I've seen him, Furber swiveled to catch each eye, I've seen him — wading. The memory made Henry grin, slowing the buggy, Wading? He pictured Jethro standing in a puddle, trousers rolled. Tott claimed afterward that Furber filled a chair like a leaky bag of potatoes. No — no — an unsteady stack of packages, a teetery tower, an uncertain clutch — yes — a chair full of perilous parcels — or — in sum: a bunch of unbundling bundles. And sleep? sleep? Sleep is like Siam — he's never been there. It was true, Henry thought, they were utter opposites. Furber's body was a box he lived in; his arms and legs propelled and fended for him like a cripple's crutches and a blind man's cane; while Omensetter's hands, for instance, had the same expression as his face; held out his nature to you like an offering of fruit; and added themselves to what they touched, enlarging them, as rivers meet and magnify their streams. Wading. Amused, Henry formed the word again, and allowed himself to watch the woods fill in. Pasting kites, Furber'd said. Rolling hoops. Hollering in the street. Fur-burr (Henry answered now as he should have then), Fur-burr, you're just an old lady… yes — a lacy old lady. But the evening had filled in Furber too, and his fierce puritan intensity. For that, Henry was grateful. He knew he'd never get used to the hot dark white-faced little man, always and seldom the same, who claimed one Sunday that the Lord had made him small and had given him his suit of pulpit clothing so he could represent to everyone the hollow inside of their bodies. No, hardly a lacy old lady. We're all niggers here — within, he'd shouted. You have a stomach cramp, he'd said, doubling, knotting his arms about his knees — then I'm its shadow. Once I was eight feet tall, he'd exclaimed, but God made me small for this purpose. What sort of talk was that?… blackened body-hollows. Jesus, Henry thought, Iike the well's column. Suppose he'd fallen there himself?

Ding dong bell,

Pimber's down our well.

Henry tried to urge his horse into a run, but on the badly rutted road, in the poor light, it refused. He cursed a moment, and gave up.

Who pushed him in?

Little Henry Pim.

Omensetter was no better than an animal himself. That was right. And Henry wondered what it was he loved, since he thought he knew what he hated.

Who'll pull him out?

Nobody's about.

What Omensetter did he did so simply that it seemed a miracle. It eased from him, his life did, like the smooth broad crayon line of the man who drew your cartoon at the fair. He had an ease impossible to imitate, for the moment you were aware, the instant you tried…

What a naughty thing was that,

To catch our little Pimber at,

Who never did him any harm,

But…

Or did he move so easily because, despite his size, he wasn't fat inside; he hadn't packed the past around his bones, or put his soul in suet. Henry had seen the engravings of the skeletons' dance. It was, however, a dance. . and if you had to die to dance…? What were the chances of the fox? The fox, he felt, had never seen his past disposed of like a fall of water. He had never measured off his day in moments: another — another — another. But now, thrown down so deeply in himself, into the darkness of the well, surprised by pain and hunger, might he not revert to an earlier condition, regain capacities which formerly were useless to him, pass from animal to Henry, become human in his prison, X his days, count, wait, listen for another — another — another — another?

When he reached home his wife immediately asked him if he had the rent and how much was it, but he passed through the house in a daze, wild and frantic, and went off again with his gun without answering, so she had to yell after him — what fool thing are you up to now? — but she would see, he thought, bitterly observing that she hadn't thought of him as off to murder or to hunt but only as a fool bent on his foolishness; and in the back of Omensetter's house, not bothering anyone, he shot the fox out with both barrels. The shot screamed on the well sides and one pellet flew up and struck him on the arm so hard through his jacket that it stuck; but he, with great effort, since the cool stars watched, paid no mind to his wound, hearing the fox thrash and go still. Furthermore I'll board it up tomorrow, he thought.

Driving home slowly, his joy draining away and leaving him fearful and cold, Henry remembered how, as a boy, he had waited at the top of the cellar stairs for his father to emerge, and how, when his father's waist was level with his eyes, without a motive or any kind of feeling that he recognized, he had struck him a terrible blow in the stomach, driving the air from his father's lungs and forcing him to bend abruptly, dropping his startled face near. Henry's mouth had filled with saliva; the base of his tongue had tingled; he had taken breath. Yet thank God he had run, weeping instead. Saliva washed over his teeth as he fled. He remembered, too, the sound of apples falling slowly on the stairs. His legs had been the first of him to be appalled. They had fallen apart like sticks.

Killing the fox had given him the same fierce heedless kind of joy, and now he leaned back in the buggy, careless of the reins, weak, waiting his punishment. Indeed he did feel strange. He had sensed his past too vividly. His head rolled with the road. He knew, of course, it was Omensetter he had struck at. He took no care with their life, that man. Luck like his did not come naturally. It had to be deserved. Anger began very faintly to stir in him again, and he was able to steady his head. But the night had blackened, the moon and stars were now under clouds, the world around him had been erased. He sank wearily in his clothes and let his head wag loosely in the circle of his collar.

Upon the beach Henry Pimber rested, passing five white carefully gathered stones from hand to hand. He could not see his face where it had fallen in the water. Omensetter's darkened house stood in his head amid clipped grass. Cold dew struck him and the sound of water in the dusk, soft and distant, like slow steps that reach through sleep, possessed him. The man was more than a model. He was a dream you might enter. From the well, in such a dream, you could easily swing two brimming buckets. In such water an image of the strength of your arms would fly up like the lark to its singing. Such birds, in such a dream, would speed with the speed of your spirit through its body where, in imitation of the air, flesh has turned itself to meadow. The pebbles fell, one by one, to the sand. Henry struggled with the urge to turn his head. Instead he bent and picked the pebbles up. The moon appeared. The pebbles were the softest pearls — like sweetest teeth. And Lucy's lamp went through his house and climbed the stairs. He flung the stones. They circled out, taking the light. One sank in the water's edge; one clicked on a greater stone; one found the sand; another brushed the marsh weeds. The last lay at his feet like a dead moth. He drove home slowly for a clouding moon.

Henry loved to tell of everything he saw when he passed Omensetter's house, though he was cowardly and quiet about the fox, and neither he nor his listeners ever thought how strange it was they took such interest in the smallest things their newest neighbor did, for Omensetter cast an interest like a shade. It was as though one could, by knowing when his beans went in or when he cut his firewood for washing, hoed, or simply walked a morning in the oak and maple woods like a tree among the trees himself, learn his secret, whatever his secret was, since it must somehow be the sum of these small things all grown together, for as Doctor Orcutt was so fond of pointing out, every measle was a sign of the disease, or as Mat Watson said, every turn of wind or rift of cloud was a parcel of the acreage of weather.

Henry asked him how he knew it was a boy, for girls, he said, were also known to kick, and Edna Hoxie, thin enough, she said, to crawl inside and pull a fat one out, stopped by to offer up her service for the time. But Omensetter said he knew. He said that birthing would be easy for a boy who'd learned to crawl already. Don't be disappointed, Brackett; Olus Knox has three, Henry said. Each time his wife conceived he hoped like you, and he has three. He finds it hard without a boy, with three who'll trade his name away when now she's past her time. It could be just the same with you. I hope not… but it could be just the same. You shouldn't count too much on what comes out of her this fall or figure from how hard the baby kicks or from how high it rides. Still Omensetter laughed. He said he knew. He'd read the signs.

At first the wound was merely sore and then the arm was stiff. Get Doctor Orcutt for the love of God, Henry said, and slunk to bed. There the stiffness spread into the neck. Lucy learned in Gilean that Orcutt was with Decius Clark at the bottom of the county. When Watson and Omensetter arrived, Henry had ceased to speak and his face grew tight as they watched. A shotgun wound? Then slippery elm, I think, Mat said. Lucy wept, running from room to room with balls of cloth in her arms. The lips drew back from the teeth, the eyelids flattened, Opium, I think, Mat said. The body bent.

The room should be dark, I think, Mat said. Lucy stumbled up and down the stairs and the jaws at last completely locked. She was drawn in by the wheeze and when Omenset ter asked her suddenly: have you any beets? the rags rolled out of her arms. The Reverend Jethro Furber, his twisted figure like a knotted string, was murmuring, immure him, cure him or immure him — some such thing — if he were really in the corner like a clothes tree, was he? was it Watson where the walls were willowing? Matthew drew off Lucy to another room. How easily he saw them. Godhead hid from him His holy farse. Immure him, Fermy murmuring, cure him or immure him. Through the withering wall he watched her try to kiss him when he helped her on the bed; tear wildly at her clothes. All I lack is a little luck and I'll lick that lock, who said? Mat then tiptoed to the bellowing hall and shut himself in its largest closet. Around him linens, towels, and female things were shelved.

Omensetter made a poultice of mashed raw red beet and bound it to the wound with rags and to the palms of the hands. Henry felt his sight fail as his lips yawned and air strenuously pushed itself between his teeth. Mat observed them from the doorway, apparently calm; but there seemed to be a button broken on his shirt and a tear in his sleeve. Then his body melted. It's up to Henry and the lockjaw now, Omensetter said; it's just between them. I'll stay, Mat said, he needs some company. But Furber hung like a drapery demonstrating him, his hollow — all could see it, billowing thinly, the wall gauze, and God's laws flickering. Omenset-ter's hands were stained with beet. He doesn't care, he said, his body also dwindling. You loosened her clothing, good, Henry heard Omensetter say as his footsteps faded on the stairs, now she's asleep. Mat held to Henry's hand while Henry whistled steadily like steam.

Orcutt came by evening, tore the poultice off the wound, gave opium and aconite, forced lobelia and capsicum into the mouth, stared at the bandaged palms but did not touch the wrappings, waited for vomiting. Watson said to Henry afterward that in his opinion the jaw had already begun to soften, and he was not surprised when the vomiting began. I'd have sworn it was hopeless, Doctor Orcutt said. The Reverend Jethro Furber came to pray and the jaw was loose by morning. Edna Hoxie, midwife, brazen, asked Omensetter for the recipe and bragged to everyone how easily she'd got it.