The Touched Nest

It was no shock to me, what happened to Gundar Krag. It was no shock to my father, either.

"Well," he said that night, letting the screen door slam behind him, "Gundar Krag got it this morning. Fell off the Jerry Slough weir and broke his back." The floor shook under him and he screeched up his chair to the table where supper always had to be ready when he came in. He reached for the pepper.

"That'll teach the son of a buck," he said. My father never cussed in the house.

My father never believed he was getting his fair share of anything. Gundar Krag was water superintendent for the association, so my father was always quarreling with him over whether he was getting his share of irrigation water. Krag wouldn't give my father any more ditch water, not even when my father had him by the short hairs. So, it was no shock to me that he got his back broken.

Something always happened to anybody who crossed my father. He either got hurt some way or got army worms in his cotton or rust in his wheat or something. A broken back seemed like awfully hard punishment to me, but even then, at 11 years old, I'd come to know there was no figurable relationship between crimes against my father and the punishment likely to come from them. There was just no figuring it. A drunk Mexican swung at my father once with a single tree and all he got out of it was a spider bite on the lip. But then Luke Hightower borrowed a disk once without asking and Luke Hightower's tractor rolled over on him two days later and broke both his legs. Jim Burdick swore once in our house and his wife died of female trouble. Now Gundar Krag had a broken back. I sat there and wondered what was going to happen to Gundar Krag's wife, Helgi.

Nobody could begin to eat at our table until my father had loaded his plate. My mother always put the biggest and best piece on top of the meat platter, but my father had to look through the platter every time. He always suspected trickery.

He looked through the platter, got gravy on his potatoes and peppered everything black. When he picked up his fork, my brother Paulie and I reached for the bread at the same time.

We looked at each other and I could tell from his face he was thinking about Helgi Krag, too. Paulie didn't look anything like my father, but sometimes they both got the same look on their faces--a kind of tight, pleased look, like things were working out pretty much the way they and God had planned.

I let Paulie have the bread plate without a fuss, not feeling very hungry, wondering what was going to happen to Helgi Krag for what she'd done to Paulie and me.

"Oh, the poor man," my mother dared to say, and my father's face came up, his mouth full, and he looked at her and she looked down.

"Didn't he have it coming?" my father asked her and she said that she guessed he did. But that wasn't enough for my father.

"I asked you didn't he have it coming?"

And my mother gave in that easy, saying yes, he did, but it seemed so hard. She said it all faint-voiced and scared to look at him.

"That'll teach the son of a buck," my brother Paulie said, and he peppered everything black.

Paulie was 12 years old then, a year older than I was. But he was a slow grower and skinny, so I'd been able to whip him since the first grade. But it didn't do me much good. If Paulie couldn't lick me, my father sure could, and Paulie knew how to please my father. Paulie would rather please my father than anything in the world, I guess.

I don't know why, but I couldn't please my father in anything. No matter what I did, it was wrong. I'd even got so I wouldn't put pepper on my food. My father carried a red-handled pocket knife with the word "Case" cut in the blade and he was forever taking that knife out of his pocket and telling me to go cut a stick I thought was the right size for the crime against him. Kids get crazy notions. There was a blade in that knife I'd seen him use on boar pigs and I never could get my breath while his thumbnail felt around over the backs of the blades. I only got my breath back when his thumbnail sank into the stick-cutting blade instead of the boar-cutting one. It was almost a relief to go cut a stick when the right blade came open.

I'd get the stick and he'd grab my arm so tight it would get numb and his eyes would be mean under his sunburned eyelids. He would hold me like that, standing wide and fat and tall as a house.

"You got this coming?" He'd always ask that and I never said no. I always just nodded, closed my eyes and started hopping in a tight circle, him still holding my arm, and hollering after the first cut, hoping to mollify him by the volume of it, I guess.

I'd always try to figure ahead of time how many cuts I was going to get. But there was no telling. He whipped according to some secret get-even count in his head and no hollering or begging was going to change the count. I'd figure it for 10 and get set for it, and it would turn out to be 20 or 25 cuts he'd set in his head as the get-even count. He whipped hard, working leg backs, bottom and back, and I hollered and hopped and counted, but I could have saved my breath. No begging or hollering was going to change his mind, once it was made up.

Then, when the count was done, he'd keep hold of my arm and squeeze, really squeeze, so I'd have his finger marks on my arm for days, and then he'd cut me loose. I knew how those boar pigs felt.

Part of the reason Gundar Krag got his back broken off the Jerry Slough weir was because one day Paulie and I visited Gundar Krag's new wife.

I begged and cussed and pleaded with Paulie to keep the thing a secret, but he got that pleased, tight look around his eyes and I knew it was no good. He told, and the old red-handled knife came out and the thumbnail felt over the blade backs and finally opened the stick-cutting blade. But that time it took him a long time to find the right blade and I wondered, standing there with no breath in me, if my father didn't know how scared I was that he was going to open the wrong blade.

"I don't want one that's going to frazzle out or break."

I was so glad that the right blade had come open that I cut a good one with heft enough to last and whip enough to cut.

• • •

We didn't plan to visit Gundar Krag's new wife. We'd stayed after school to walk over to Arthur Dize's place to get the loan of a bee smoker. As we went by Gundar Krag's house we just looked through the back fence to see if maybe we could get a look at the new wife he'd just brought over from Denmark.

We knelt down and looked through the fence cracks and then we both jerked back and looked at each other and then banged our foreheads back up against the fence. I heard Paulie's breath ease out of him. I just grooved my forehead up against the fence and looked at Gundar Krag's new wife sitting in a chair in her yard with her oiled and lovely face tipped to the sky, the lids over her closed eyes gleaming.

All of her was gleaming. Gundar Krag's new wife was sitting there in broad daylight with no clothes on. Nothing. No clothes at all. Not any.

Paulie whispered something without taking his eye away from the fence crack.

"Shut up," I tried to whisper, but my throat was dry and it came out loud.

We watched her eyes open, saw her knees bend, saw her beautiful legs gather beneath her and watched her stand up. She walked toward the gate, toward us. We should have cut and run, but the crinkled gleaming of the golden triangle and the ponderously beautiful sway of all the history of woman's breasts held us. We were still on our knees at the fence when she opened the gate and smiled at us and motioned us inside.

I guess we got up and went. I guess we did, because the next thing I knew we were sitting inside the yard and she was bending over us, scorching us with her nearness, pouring cold lemonade. We drank that lemonade straight down without tasting it, like thirst-maddened things, like dogs after a long, hard run. I looked at her over and around the rim of the glass, down to the last untasted drop. She sat back down.

"I am Helgi Krag," she said in a foreign way and there was never a voice like that. She was Helgi Krag, and she leaned her blonde head back and closed her eyes again. I stared at her eyelids. I cut one look at Paulie. He always had trouble keeping his front teeth inside his mouth and his upper teeth were getting dry against his lower lip. He looked like when you think you've just found a bone in a mouthful of fish and you're afraid you're going to have to swallow anyway. I looked back at Helgi Krag and heard Paulie's rifle-bang swallow.

Paulie never knew when to talk and when to keep still.

"Awful hot day," he said, minding what he thought were his manners. He edged forward in his chair like you do when you're going to stand up and start walking. "Well, we're obliged for the lemonade."

I just couldn't believe it, but I looked at him and saw that look on his face. My father might just as well have hooked a length of baling wire through the bib of his overalls and held one end. Paulie was answering a jerk on that wire. He was going to please.

"Shut up," I told Paulie.

"We were just on our way over to Arthur Dize's to get the loan of his bee smoker," Paulie said, like that was something to compare with what we were doing.

Helgi Krag opened her eyes. She had those kind of blue, blue eyes that haven't got any backs to them. I looked right through them and could see things moving around back there. I looked into her eyes and my blood whammed up against the dam of my toes and fingers so they beat and itched. That's how strong it was. I just wanted to walk in front of her for the rest of my life, beating snakes and squashing scorpions and choking hydrophobic dogs to death. I'd never felt anything like it before.

She waved one hand down the length of her.

"In Denmark," she said, "we take the sun."

"We sure don't around here," Paulie said.

"Some of us go skinny-dipping," I told her, trying to make her comfortable after what Paulie had said.

"Skinny-dipping?" she asked, and it was just beautiful the way she said it, and I told her that's what we called going swimming in the canals without any clothes on. She clapped her hands like we were all the same age.

"Oh, I would like that," she said, and you knew she would.

Paulie shifted in his chair.

"We got to go," he said.

"Shut up, Paulie," I told him.

"It's good to take the sun," Helgi Krag said.

"You just better bet," I said.

"Your mother ... she takes the sun?" Helgi Krag asked that and the wire to Paulie yanked him out of his chair.

"Now," he said, "now we got to go."

I knew Helgi Krag wouldn't have asked that if she'd known Momma at all. Momma took off her clothes at night after she'd put on her nightgown.

"Well, maybe you come back again," Helgi Krag said, standing up. Paulie pulled the trigger on his swallow again and pretended to be looking at a mud dauber's nest up under the eaves of the house. But I could see his eyes roll. He wasn't fooling me.

"You just better bet we'll be back," I told her, not pretending to be looking at any old mud dauber's nest.

Paulie went to the gate like he wasn't going to look back. But he did. I backed all the way to the gate and Paulie slammed the gate on my back. I didn't even care. I went out the gate and started to cut around to the side to look some more through the fence, but Paulie yanked at me and I went with him because I thought we'd be spending a lot of time there.

A ways down the road Paulie said exactly what I should have known he was going to.

"I'm going to tell."

I should have known. I begged and cussed and threatened and it made Paulie look more pleased. He grinned, his teeth sticking out.

"Buck naked," he said, and loved the taste of it so much he just had to say it again. "Buck naked!"

It stopped me. I couldn't believe I'd heard him right.

"Buck naked?"

It was just an example of the way Paulie could twist things around. Helgi Krag hadn't been naked. Something, sure. Not naked. There was some little truth to it, sure. She didn't have any clothes on, but she sure wasn't naked.

"A grown woman," Paulie said, "buck naked in front of two little kids."

"Paulie," I said, "she wasn't buck naked."

He was pretty sure of his ground. He just walked along, grinning.

"She looked mighty naked to me," he said.

"I tell you, she wasn't naked." I said.

"You crazy little fool," Paulie said, and I tried to tell him.

"You remember the time Antonia Reyes was taking a shower in the shower-house and you took me to look through the knothole? Remember, she heard us and hollered and tried to cover herself up and yelled she was going to tell on us? Well, Antonia Reyes was naked."

"Listen, you crazy little fool," Paulie said, "they were both naked."

But it wasn't true. There was a big difference between Antonia Reyes yelling and covering herself up and Helgi Krag talking to us and pouring lemonade.

"There's going to be trouble over this," Paulie said. "A mess of it and a cupful for mother starter."

I'd heard my father say it a hundred times. They both said it the same way you or I would say: "Oh, boy, we're going to get out the freezer and make some ice cream!" Happy, looking forward to it.

We turned into the Dizes' place to get the bee smoker and Arthur was in the field, but Mrs. Dize went to the shed and got it for us. Mrs. Dize was an awful fat woman with red wrinkles around her neck and veins in her legs that were so knotted and bunched they looked like big bruises. I noticed the way Paulie was looking at her. He gave me the smoker to carry. When we were out the gate I asked him:

"How come you were looking at Mrs. Dize like that?" He didn't try to pretend he didn't know what I was talking about.

"You crazy little fool," he said. "Now I know."

"Know what?"

"What they all look like," he said. "From bridle to crupper."

That was another my father was always saying.

"Mrs. Dize had on clothes," I told him.

His teeth edged out over his lip.

"Once you catch onto it," he said, "clothes don't mean anything."

I thought about it and could see what he meant.

"It's not fair, though," I told him. "Doing that to them when they don't know."

"You crazy little fool," Paulie told me.

When we got to our gate Paulie took the smoker so it would look like he'd been carrying it all the time in case we saw Poppa.

"Buck naked," he said again, and wet his teeth with his tongue.

He saved it for supper. He waited until my father had loaded his plate and peppered everything black. Paulie knew how to make people listen.

"Well, we saw Gundar Krag's new wife today."

My mother looked up, all interested.

"Oh? What was she like?"

Paulie buttered a whole slice of bread and then put pepper on it.

"She was buck naked," Paulie said and took a bite.

Anything that came up that kind of threw my mother off, she began to make little snuffling noises. She began to make those noises. My father laid down his fork and Paulie chewed, letting it stretch until he heard my father take breath.

"Yes, she came to the gate buck naked and asked us to sit with her. She sat like that all the time I was trying to get him to leave."

My father had some breath.

"You mean to say ... ?" He waved his hand up and down.

"Nothing," Paulie said.

My mother just kept making those snuffling noises. My father looked at her and screeched back his chair. He was awfully strict about cussing and things like that in the house.

"You come out here with me," he told Paulie and me.

"Now," he said when we were out on the porch, meaning for Paulie to start over again from the very beginning and not to leave anything out.

"She wasn't naked." I hadn't meant to say it, but there it was and I had to go on with it.

My father had a way of swinging his head kind of slow and mean and ending the swing with you hung on the end of his glare. I hung there.

"One of you is lying," my father said.

"He is," Paulie said. "I wouldn't look at her and kept trying to get him to leave. But he sat there bug-eyed."

"What did she have on?" my father asked me.

"Nothing."

My father reached in his pocket and took out the knife.

"She didn't act naked," I said. I was pretty near to crying.

His thumbnail began wandering over the backs of the blades. He didn't ask Paulie. He asked me. His voice was kind of faraway.

"Skinny woman?"

"No."

"Fat?" Still in that voice, his thumbnail still hovering.

And I knew what to say.

"Just right," I said.

It was as close as me and my father ever came to talking.

"I don't want one that's going to frazzle out or break," he said, and I got a good one.

"You got this coming?"

I thought it would be 30 and set myself for it, but it wasn't 30 or even 40. It was 50. The highest get-even count he'd ever settled on. Finally he let me go and you would have thought that would have been enough. But it wasn't.

He threw the stick away and went over and put his hand right on Paulie's head and patted him.

"You're a good boy, Paulie," he said, with his hand right there on Paulie's head, patting him. But even that wasn't enough for Paulie.

"She asked if Momma sat around naked in our yard," he said, and it brought my father up short.

"She asked that?" he said through his teeth. "Did she ... did she bring up any other names?"

"What do you mean?" Paulie asked him, and he kind of kneeled down in front of Paulie to look into his face.

"Nothing," my father said after he'd looked close into Paulie's face. Then he stepped off the porch and onto the ground and swore hard and then stepped back onto the porch and into the house.

"There's going to be trouble over this," my father said. "A mess of it and a cupful for mother starter."

I was bawling, but I could see Paulie's face through my tears and he never looked happier.

My mother looked up when my father came in. She looked more scared than usual with her hand over her mouth. She'd stopped making those snuffling noises and was begging something with her eyes.

"Is it ... was it ... ?" Whatever she was asking, she was almost whispering. My father swung his head and let her hang.

"Can't you just try to be decent?"

My mother turned and went into the kitchen like she'd been lamed. I'd heard him ask her that a thousand times.

I went out onto the porch, alone. I didn't know what to do. I could see myself walking in front of Helgi Krag and killing mad dogs with my bare hands, but I couldn't see myself keeping her safe from whatever my father was going to do to her. There was just nothing I could do.

It made me feel so mean and weak that I climbed the pepper tree and looked down into the bee martin's nest and those little baby birds knew I was there and opened up their beaks and squeaked and carried on, like I had something to give them. I began to bawl again and picked up each one of those little birds, all warm and naked, and kissed each one. It was a crazy thing to do. Those baby birds yelling for worms and me giving them kisses.

Paulie came into the bedroom that night when I was still on my knees beside the bed. It was the only thing I could figure to do and I sure didn't want to get caught at it. I pretended like I was straightening the covers.

But you couldn't fool Paulie.

He took off his clothes and shoes, looking at me, almost grinning. He got in bed and put his hands in back of his head.

"You crazy little fool," he said up to the ceiling.

I didn't answer him.

"You think praying will do her any good? Well, it won't."

I got into bed and didn't shove for my share of the bed.

"What do you think he'll do to her?" I asked him.

"Cripple her, give her infantile paralysis or cut her face all to pieces in a car wreck," Paulie said.

It would have been encouraging to Paulie to say anything. I lay there for a long time.

"Paulie," I finally asked him, "what did she do?"

"You crazy little fool," Paulie said.

My back and bottom were still awful sore and I rolled over on my stomach and shoved. But Paulie began to make big fake snores to tell me he was pretty satisfied with the way things had gone. I wondered if you had to get down on your knees for it to work and decided not to take the chance of Paulie rolling over and looking at me. I lay there in the dark all alone and promised a lot of things if Helgi Krag would get let off.

I kept a pretty sharp watch, but Gundar Krag's pickup didn't come to our head gate for three days. But when I saw it coming I grabbed a wire net and ran down to be beside the head gate when he got there. I let the net down into the water and pretended to be waiting for carp and Krag stopped and got out. Some men always have to be teasing kids, but Gundar Krag never did. I said hello to him and he said hello to me.

My father came out of a shed and came over. He wasn't hurrying and he was smiling. I put my head down and acted like I didn't care about anything in this world but netting a few carp. But it didn't work.

"Get," he told me. I pulled up the net and acted like I was leaving, but once on the other side of the canal bank I lay down and flattened out.

"You've cheated me long enough," my father told Gundar Krag without even saying hello. "Now I've got you by the short hairs and I want ditch water."

I didn't hear Gundar Krag answer him.

"I don't need to talk," my father said. "Your woman showed herself buck naked to my two little boys, but I don't need to talk about it. Not if I got ditch water, as much of it as I wanted and when I wanted it."

Gundar Krag didn't sound mad or mean or excited.

"You will get your share of water," he said.

"Listen," my father said, "I got you by the short hairs."

"My Helgi," Krag said, "she didn't know it was not the custom here. In Denmark it is not dirty to lie in the sun without clothes. She did not know."

"I don't have to talk about it. I could keep quiet about it."

I could just barely hear Gundar Krag.

"No, I know your mind. You could not keep quiet about it. To you it is too dirty and you could not keep quiet about such a dirty thing. You would talk."

"Just what do you mean by that?" My father sounded like he was threatening Gundar Krag.

"I mean you are a dirty little man," Gundar Krag said. "You are tall and you are fat, but inside you are little and nasty. Everything you touch you make little and nasty."

I poked my head up to see. My father took off his hat and threw it on the ground. His face was red.

"You got a whipping coming to you," he hollered.

Gundar Krag didn't even look up from twisting the head gate.

"No, you are only good for talk. Only talk."

My father bent over and got his hat.

"Mister man," my father told him, "I'm not finished with you."

I flattened out again, squirmed back and cut for the house. Later I went in through the kitchen door and my mother was talking in the front room.

"Leave her be, poor thing." She was almost begging, it sounded like. "Maybe she just doesn't know any better."

My father's voice was mean.

"Listen, decent is decent."

My mother began to cry and I began to edge back toward the door, wanting to get out of there.

"Can't anybody ever make a mistake around you?" my mother asked him. She was crying.

I eased open the door. But I couldn't make it out in time and keep the door from slamming. I heard it. Saying it like she was dirty, like she was nothing, like she was dirt nothing.

"You would ask that," he told her.

I got outside.

Sometimes when they go at each other like that it seems like they must have a kind of secret language. Oh, you can hear the words they're saying and all, but what they really say, how they really hurt each other, is in the stillnesses and in between and under the words. When I was a lot littler I used to listen to them going on like that, him hollering and her crying. It brought on the same smothery scared feeling as when his thumbnail hit the boar-cutting blade when he was going to get even for something.

Oh, they didn't ever say my name. But they didn't need to. In the stillnesses and in the in-between places, why, he was just hollering my name and she was crying over me.

I climbed the pepper tree again and looked down into the bee martin's nest. It was empty, bare empty. I climbed back down and tried to tell myself that those naked babies had feathered out and left the nest, flying high and free. But back on the ground I heard them still going on in the house and knew it was no good trying to lie about it. My mother had told me a thousand times.

"Don't ever touch a bird's nest," she'd told me a thousand times. "The father won't feed the babies if he thinks somebody has been fooling around the nest. He'll just throw those babies out of the nest."

Well, that was what had happened.

• • •

My father told everybody. In the store and at the gin and whoever happened by. Paulie told everyone at school. I got so I could tell just by the look on their faces when they were telling somebody, even when I was too far away to hear.

I kept waiting to hear something, but there was never any news about Helgi Krag, anything happening to her, I mean. I used to walk by the place quite a bit, but I never stopped. Gundar Krag came home from the hospital and they said he would be in a wheelchair the rest of his life. Their house began to look like nobody lived there.

But I had to go, finally. I hadn't heard anything and I had to know. I knocked and stood there on Helgi Krag's doorstep and waited to see her. After a while I heard slow, draggy steps and then the door opened a crack. I looked up into Helgi Krag's eyes.

"Are you all right?" I asked her, but the cooler was going in the house and making so much noise I couldn't hear if she answered me.

"Are you all right?" I asked her again, and she put her mouth to the crack of the door and I heard her. I heard her plain.

"Go away, you nasty little boy."

That's the last thing Helgi Krag ever said to me.

For a while I thought about training a pigeon to carry a message to her, to try to explain. But Paulie had a .22 rifle by then and well, anyway, I had to stand by a promise I made to the dark one night. I promised I'd never try to see Helgi Krag again if my father would let her off.

It's hard to know for sure, because nobody ever sees her. But so far, anyway, it looks like my father has let her off.