Page 16 - WTP Vol. IX #6

Anatomy (continued from preceding page)
came ambling over. He must have smelled us, because he was blind in one eye. The other one dripped green goo. When we got home that day, Dad was just com- ing up the steps from his basement darkroom into the kitchen, and I ran into his arms.
“I saw a horsey!”
“Well, now, Bobby. What color was that horsey?”
“Brown ’n’ white ’n’ brown ’n’ white ’n’ brown ’n’ white!”
Dad looked at Mom, and the laughter that followed was like that heard around Morning Glory Gulch the day after the still blew up.
So we began bringing apples to feed to Jack the Horse whenever we drove down the mountain. And contin- ued doing so, until one day—as with Mom later—Jack wasn’t there.
~
Old Man Kelsey owned the Handi-Foods store. He
also owned most of the farmland surrounding Morn- ing Glory Gulch. His standard duds consisted of a
blue work shirt and bib overalls—called “overhauls” locally. His balding head was topped by a greasy base- ball cap of the Salem Red Sox, a farm team of the real deal way up in Boston. Kelsey “commuted” between his trailer and Handi-Foods store in an army jeep, though it was less than a mile. He had great difficulty walking because he’d been wounded in World War
II, and again in Korea. I liked Kelsey, but he never
had much to say when I’d stop for a Popsicle, prop- ping my bike against the dirty plate-glass window of the Handi-Foods store and scooting inside. One day when I came out, Popsicle stick in my fist, a pickup truck swung into the gas pumps, spraying gravel.
There was a rifle on the rack in the rear window and a bobcat sprawled in the rear bed. The tawny ani- mal, smaller than you might expect, had an open red gash in its throat. The driver had shot it and wanted to show it to Kelsey, who’d begun to hobble outside when the gravel ticked his window.
“Pig?” Kelsey said.
“Cat.” The shirtless driver—it was summer—wiped his hands on his jeans. “I reckon this’s the critter’s been stealing your chickens.”
Kelsey nodded. He’d built an ersatz chicken coop behind his trailer. A dozen chickens were always pecking around by the side of the road. “Obliged for the hep.”
Kelsey had a rifle, too, and a tripod for it. He was fond of hunting “pig,” the Gulch term for groundhog. Each year he offered ten bucks for the largest one brought in, a way to keep his farmland clear of a nuisance while drumming up business at the Hand-Foods store. “Got me plans for that land,” I’d hear him say from time to time, “when I git aroun’ to retirin’.”
He weighed those groundhogs right there on a scale on the wooden counter next to his cash register. It usually took a 15-pounder to win the money, but Kelsey claimed to have taken a 20-pounder in his youth. He’d pay the winner at Christmas with a crisp ten-dollar bill, money he considered a good invest- ment against the windfall he’d reap when he got “aroun’ to retirin’” and sold his land.
Some evenings Kelsey would close up shop early and drive his jeep through the meadow behind the pasture where Jack the Horse grazed, setting up his tripod on a far knoll. Then he’d mount his rifle and kneel behind it, waiting for “pig” to pop up below. The pig would sit on their haunches to nibble the abundant Queen Anne’s lace, whose flat white heads rose in clusters at the end of green stalks. The first time Dad ever saw Old Man Kelsey he was shooting pig. Dad was jogging along the grassy tracks through the meadow. (He was a jogger long before jogging became fashionable.) It was dusk, and as he squinted into the face of the setting sun, there was Old Man Kelsey, silhouetted in the distance behind a tripod, his jeep in the tall grass off to the right.
“How wonderful!” Dad told me, not long after he explained about No Business Mountain. “Here was a neighbor with an artistic bent—a photographer like me—about to shoot the sunset!”
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